Kamel Daoud - The Meursault Investigation

The murderer lived somewhere in a neighborhood not far from the sea, but many years later I discovered that he somehow had no address. There was a building with a vaguely sagging upper story above a café, poorly protected by a few trees, but its windows were always closed in those days, so I think Mama insulted an anonymous old Frenchwoman with no connection to our tragedy. Long after Independence, a new tenant opened the shutters and eliminated the last possibility of a mystery. This is all to tell you that no one was ever able to say he’d crossed the murderer’s path or looked into his eyes or understood his motives. Mama questioned a great many people, so many that I eventually felt ashamed for her, as if she was begging for money and not clues. Her investigations served as a ritual to lessen her pain, and her comings and goings in the French part of the city turned, however incongruously, into opportunities to take some extended walks. I recall the day when we finally arrived at the sea, the last witness left to question. The sky was gray, and a few meters away from me was our family’s immense and mighty adversary, the thief of Arabs and the killer of marauders in overalls. It was indeed the last witness on Mama’s list. As soon as we got there, she pronounced Sidi Abderrahman’s name and then, several times, the name of God, ordered me to stay away from the water, sat down, and massaged her aching ankles. I stood behind her, a child facing the immensity of both the crime and the horizon. Please make a note of that sentence, I think it’s important. What did I feel? Nothing except the wind on my skin — it was autumn, the autumn after the murder. I tasted the salt, I saw the dense gray waves. That’s all. The sea was like a wall with soft, moving edges. Far off, up in the sky, there were some heavy white clouds. I started picking up things that were lying on the sand: seashells, glass shards, bottle caps, clumps of dark seaweed. The sea told us nothing, and Mama remained motionless on the shore, like someone bending over a grave. Finally she stood up straight, looked attentively right and left, and said in a hoarse voice, “God’s curse be upon you!” Then she took me by the hand and led me away from the sand, as she’d done so often before. I followed her.

So I had a ghost’s childhood. There were happy moments, of course, but what did they matter, scattered through those long condolences? And I don’t suppose you’re putting up with this pretentious monologue of mine for the happy moments. Besides, it was you who came to me — I really wonder how you were able to track us down! You’re here because you think, as I once thought, that you can find Musa or his body, identify the place where the murder was committed, and trumpet your discovery to the whole world. I understand you. You want to find a corpse, and I’m trying to get rid of one. And not just one, believe me! But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. That’s denial of a shockingly violent kind, don’t you think? As soon as the shot is fired, the murderer turns around, heading for a mystery he considers worthier of interest than the Arab’s life. He continues on his way, the bedazzled martyr. As for my brother Zujj, he’s discreetly removed from the scene and deposited I don’t know where. Neither seen nor known, only killed. It’s like his body was hidden by God in person! There’s no trace in the official reports filed in any police station, none in the minutes of the trial, nothing in the book or in the cemeteries. Nothing. Sometimes my imagination runs even wilder than usual, I get even more lost. Maybe it was me, I’m Cain, I killed my brother! I’ve often wanted to kill Musa since he died, to get rid of his corpse, to get Mama’s affection back, to recover my body and my senses, to … In any case, it’s a strange story. It’s your hero who does the killing, it’s me who feels guilty, and I’m the one condemned to wandering …

One last memory: the visits to the hereafter, on Fridays, at the summit of Bab-el-Oued. I’m talking about El-Kettar cemetery, otherwise known as “the Perfumer” because of the former jasmine distillery located nearby. Every other Friday, we’d go to the cemetery to visit Musa’s empty grave. Mama would whimper, which I found uncalled-for and ridiculous, because there wasn’t anything in that hole. I remember the mint that grew in the cemetery, the trees, the winding aisles, Mama’s white haik against the overly blue sky. Everybody in the neighborhood knew the hole was empty, knew Mama filled it with her prayers and an invented biography. That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly. Those days, the cemetery days, were the first days when I turned to pray, not toward Mecca but toward the world. Nowadays I’m still working on better versions of those prayers. But back then I had discovered, in some obscure way, a form of sensuality. How can I explain it to you? The angle of the light, the vigorous blue of the sky, and the wind awakened me to something more disturbing than the simple satisfaction you feel after a need is met. Remember I wasn’t quite ten years old, and therefore still clinging to my mother’s breast. That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me. My mother never guessed it was there that I definitively buried Musa one day, mutely shouting at him to leave me alone. Precisely there , in El-Kettar, an Arab cemetery. Today it’s a dirty place, inhabited by fugitives and drunks. I’m told that marble is stolen from the tombs each and every night. You want to go and see it? It’ll be a waste of time, you won’t find anyone there, and you especially won’t find a trace of that grave, which was dug like the Prophet Yusuf’s well. If the body’s not in it, you can’t prove anything. Mama wasn’t entitled to anything. Not to apologies before Independence, not to a pension afterward.

Actually, we would have had to start all over from the beginning and go a different way — the way of books, for example, and more specifically of one book, the one you bring with you every day to this bar. I read it twenty years after it came out, and it overwhelmed me with its sublime lying and its magical accord with my life. A strange story, isn’t it? Let’s summarize: We have a confession, written in the first person, but we have no other evidence to prove Meursault’s guilt; his mother never existed, for him least of all; Musa was an Arab replaceable by a thousand others of his kind, or by a crow, even, or a reed, or whatever else; the beach has disappeared, erased by footprints or agglomerations of concrete; the only witness was a star, namely the sun; the plaintiffs were illiterate, and they moved out of town; and finally, the trial was a wicked travesty put on by idle colonials. What can you do with a man who meets you on a desert island and tells you that yesterday he killed a certain Friday? Nothing.

In this movie I saw one day, a man was mounting some long flights of stairs to reach an altar where he was supposed to have his throat cut by way of soothing some god or other. The man was climbing with his head down, moving slowly, heavily, as if exhausted, undone, subdued, but most of all as if already dispossessed of his own body. I was struck by his fatalism, by his incredible passivity. I’m sure some people thought he was defeated, but I knew he was quite simply elsewhere. I could tell from his way of carrying his own body on his own back, like a porter with a burden. Well then, I was like that man, I felt the porter’s weariness more than the victim’s fear.