The Immoralist — Chapter 2

Chapter 3 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

Why speak of those first days? What is left of them? Their hideous memory has no voice. I no longer knew who I was, or where. I see again only, above my bed of agony, Marceline, my wife, my life, bending over me. I know that her passionate care, that her love alone, saved me. One day at last, like a lost sailor who catches sight of land, I felt a glimmer of life waking in me; I was able to smile at Marceline. — Why tell all this? What mattered was that death had touched me, as the saying goes, with its wing. What matters is that it became for me a most astonishing thing that I should be alive, that the daylight took on for me a light beyond all hope. Before, I thought, I did not understand that I was living. I was to make of life the palpitating discovery.

The day came when I could get up. I was completely won over by our home. It was hardly more than a terrace. But what a terrace! My room and Marceline's opened onto it; it ran on over the roofs. From the highest part of it one saw, above the houses, palm trees; above the palm trees, the desert. The other side of the terrace touched the gardens of the town; the branches of the last cassias shaded it; at length it skirted the courtyard, a small regular courtyard planted with six regular palm trees, and ended at the staircase that joined it to the courtyard. My room was large and airy; whitewashed walls, nothing on the walls; a little door led to Marceline's room; a big glazed door opened onto the terrace.

There flowed days without hours. How often, in my solitude, have I seen those slow days again!… Marceline is beside me. She reads; she sews; she writes. I do nothing. I look at her. O Marceline! Marceline!… I look. I see the sun; I see the shade; I see the line of the shade shift; I have so little to think of that I watch it. I am still very weak; I breathe very badly; everything tires me, even reading; and besides, read what? Simply being occupies me enough.

One morning Marceline comes in laughing:

"I am bringing you a friend," she says; and I see coming in behind her a little Arab with a brown skin. His name is Bachir, he has large silent eyes that look at me. I am rather ill at ease, and that unease already tires me; I say nothing and appear vexed. The child, faced with the coldness of my welcome, is put out, turns back to Marceline, and, with a movement of coaxing animal grace, nestles against her, takes her hand, kisses it with a gesture that uncovers his bare arms. I notice that he is quite naked under his thin white gandoura and his patched burnous.

"Come along! sit down there," says Marceline, who sees my unease. "Amuse yourself quietly."

The little fellow sits down on the floor, takes a knife out of the hood of his burnous, and a piece of djerid, and begins to work at it. It is a whistle, I think, that he means to make.

After a little while, I am no longer troubled by his presence. I look at him; he seems to have forgotten that he is there. His feet are bare; his ankles are charming, and the joints of his wrists. He handles his wretched knife with an amusing skill… Really, am I going to take an interest in this? His hair is shaved in the Arab fashion; he wears a poor chéchia with nothing but a hole where the tassel should be. The gandoura, slipping a little, uncovers his delicate shoulder. I feel a need to touch it. I lean over; he turns round and smiles at me. I make a sign that he is to hand me his whistle, take it and pretend to admire it greatly. — Now he wants to go. Marceline gives him a cake, and I two sous.

The next day, for the first time, I am bored; I wait; wait for what? I feel idle, restless. At last I can bear it no longer:

"So Bachir is not coming this morning, Marceline?"

"If you like, I will go and fetch him."

She leaves me and goes down; a moment later she comes back alone. What has illness made of me? I am sad enough to weep at seeing her return without Bachir.

"It was too late," she tells me; "the children have left school and scattered everywhere. There are charming ones among them, you know. I believe they all know me by now."

"At least see that he is here tomorrow."

The next day Bachir came back. He sat down as he had the day before yesterday, took out his knife, tried to cut a wood too hard for it, and managed so well that he drove the blade into his thumb. I shuddered with horror; he laughed at it, showed the bright cut and amused himself watching his blood run. When he laughed he uncovered very white teeth; he licked his wound with relish; his tongue was pink as a cat's. Ah, how well he was! That was what I was falling in love with in him: health. The health of that little body was beautiful.

The day after, he brought marbles. He wanted to make me play. Marceline was not there; she would have held me back. I hesitated, looked at Bachir; the boy seized my arm, put the marbles into my hand, forced me to it. I grew very short of breath stooping down, but I tried to play all the same. Bachir's pleasure charmed me. At last I could do no more. I was bathed in sweat. I threw down the marbles and let myself drop into an armchair. Bachir, a little troubled, was looking at me.

"Ill?" he said kindly; the timbre of his voice was exquisite. Marceline came in.

"Take him away," I said to her; "I am tired this morning."

A few hours later I had a spitting of blood. It happened as I was walking with difficulty on the terrace; Marceline was busy in her room; fortunately she could see nothing of it. Being out of breath, I had drawn a deeper breath, and all at once it came. It had filled my mouth… But it was no longer clear blood, as at the first spittings; it was a great hideous clot that I spat out on the ground in disgust.

I took a few steps, unsteady. I was horribly shaken. I was trembling. I was afraid; I was angry. — For until then I had thought that, step by step, recovery would come and that there was nothing to do but wait for it. This brutal accident had just thrown me back. Strange thing, the first spittings had not affected me so much; I remembered now that they had left me almost calm. Where then did my fear come from, my horror, now? It was that I was beginning, alas, to love life.

I turned back, stooped, found my spittle again, took a straw and, lifting the clot, laid it on my handkerchief. I looked at it. It was foul blood, almost black, something gluey, appalling… I thought of Bachir's fine glowing blood. And suddenly a desire took hold of me, a craving, something more furious, more imperious than anything I had felt until then: to live! I want to live. I want to live. I clenched my teeth, my fists, gathered myself wholly, frantically, desolately, into that effort toward existence.

I had received the day before a letter from T***; in answer to anxious questions from Marceline, it was full of medical advice; T*** had even enclosed with his letter a few popular medical pamphlets and a more specialized book, which for that very reason struck me as more serious. I had read the letter carelessly and the printed matter not at all; first because the resemblance of those pamphlets to the little moral tracts with which my childhood had been badgered did not dispose me in their favour; and because, too, all advice irritated me; then, I did not think that these "Counsels to Consumptives", this "Practical Cure of Tuberculosis", could apply to my case. I did not believe myself consumptive. I readily attributed my first haemoptysis to some other cause; or rather, to tell the truth, I attributed it to nothing at all, avoided thinking of it, hardly thought of it, and judged myself, if not cured, at least near to being so… I read the letter; I devoured the book, the treatises. Abruptly, with a startling clearness, it appeared to me that I had not been looking after myself as I should. Until then I had let myself live, trusting to the vaguest hope; — abruptly my life appeared to me under attack, atrociously attacked at its centre. A numerous, active enemy was living within me. I listened to it: I spied on it; I felt it. I should not overcome it without a struggle… and I added under my breath, as though the better to convince myself of it: it is a matter of will.

I put myself on a footing of hostility.

Evening was falling: I organized my strategy. For a time, my recovery alone was to be my study; my duty was my health; I must judge good, must name Good, everything that was salutary to me, forget and thrust away everything that did not cure. Before the evening meal I had taken my resolutions concerning breathing, exercise, and food.

We took our meals in a sort of little kiosk that the terrace enclosed on every side. Alone, quiet, far from everything, the intimacy of our meals was charming. From a hotel nearby an old negro brought us passable food. Marceline looked over the menus, ordered one dish, sent back another… Not being as a rule very hungry, I did not suffer much from the dishes that went wrong, nor from the insufficient menus. Marceline, herself accustomed to eating little, did not know, did not realize, that I was not eating enough. To eat a great deal was, of all my resolutions, the first. I meant to put it into execution that very evening. — I could not. We had some uneatable salmis or other, then a roast ridiculously overcooked.

My irritation was so keen that, turning it upon Marceline, I poured out before her a flood of immoderate words. I accused her; to hear me, it seemed that she ought to have felt responsible for the poor quality of the food. This small delay to the regimen I had resolved to adopt took on the gravest importance; I forgot the preceding days; this spoiled meal spoiled everything. I would not give way. Marceline had to go down into the town to look for a tin of something, a pâté of no matter what.

She came back soon with a little terrine that I devoured almost entirely, as if to prove to us both how much I needed to eat more.

That same evening we settled this: the meals should be much better; more frequent too, one every three hours; the first at half past six. An abundant store of tinned food of every kind would make up for the mediocre dishes of the hotel…

I could not sleep that night, so much did the presentiment of my new virtues intoxicate me. I had, I think, a little fever; a bottle of mineral water stood there; I drank a glass of it, two glasses; the third time, drinking from the bottle itself, I finished the whole of it at one draught. I went over my will as one goes over a lesson; I learned my hostility, directed it upon all things; I must fight against everything: my salvation depended upon myself alone.

At last I saw the night grow pale; the day appeared.

That had been my vigil of arms.

The next day was Sunday. Until then I had not concerned myself, I confess it, with Marceline's beliefs; out of indifference or reserve, it seemed to me that it was no business of mine; and then I attached no importance to it. — That day Marceline went to mass. On her return I learned that she had prayed for me. I looked at her steadily, then, with all the gentleness I could:

"You must not pray for me, Marceline."

"Why?" she said, a little troubled.

"I do not like protection."

"You refuse God's help?"

"Afterwards he would have a right to my gratitude. That creates obligations; I do not want any."

We had the air of joking, but we were in no way mistaken about the importance of our words.

"You will not get well all by yourself, my poor friend," she sighed.

"Then so much the worse…" Then, seeing her sadness, I added less brutally: "You will help me."