The Immoralist/Part 1, 3

I am going to speak at length of my body. I shall speak of it so much you will think at first I have forgotten my soul. This omission, as I tell you my story, is intentional; out there, it was a fact. I had not strength enough to keep up a double life. "I will think of the spirit and that side of things later," I said to myself,"—when I get better."

I was still far from being well. The slightest thing put me into a perspiration; the slightest thing gave me a cold; my breath was short; sometimes I had a little fever, and often, from early morning, oppressed by a dreadful feeling of lassitude, I remained prostrate in an armchair, indifferent to everything, self-centred, solely occupied in trying to breathe properly. I breathed laboriously, methodically, carefully; my expiration came in two jerks which, with the greatest effort of my will, I could only partially control; for a long time to come, ​I still had need of all my attention to avoid this.

But what troubled me most was my morbid sensibility to changes of temperature. I think, when I come to reflect on it today, that, in addition to my illness, I was suffering from a general nervous derangement. I cannot otherwise explain a series of phenomena which it seems to me impossible to attribute entirely to a simple condition of tuberculosis. I was always either too hot or too cold; I put on a ridiculous number of clothes, and only stopped shivering when I began to perspire; then, directly I took anything off, I shivered as soon as I stopped perspiring. Certain portions of my body would turn as cold as ice and, in spite of perspiration, felt like marble to the touch; nothing would warm them. I was so sensitive to cold that if a little water dropped on my feet while I was washing, it gave me a relapse; I was equally sensitive to heat.… This sensibility I kept and still keep, but now it gives me exquisite enjoyment. Any very keen sensibility may, I believe, according as the organism is robust or weakly, become a source of delight or discomfort. Everything which formerly distressed me is now a delicious pleasure.

I do not know how I had managed to sleep up till then with my windows shut; in accordance with ​T…'s advice, I now tried keeping them open at night; a little at first; soon I flung them wide; soon it became a habit, a need so great that directly the window was shut, I felt stifled. Later on, with what rapture was I to feel the night wind blow, the moon shine in upon me!…

But I am anxious to have done with these first stammerings after health. Indeed, thanks to constant attention, to pure air, to better food, I soon began to improve. Up till then, my breathlessness had made me dread the stairs and I had not dared to leave the terrace; in the last days of January I at last went down and ventured into the garden.

Marceline came with me, carrying a shawl. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. The wind, which is often violent in those parts and which I had found particularly unpleasant during the last few days, had dropped. The air was soft and charming.

The public gardens!… A very wide path runs through the middle of them, shaded by two rows of that kind of very tall mimosa, that out there is called cassia. Benches are placed in the shadow of the trees. A canalized river—one, I mean, that is not wide so much as deep, and almost straight—flows alongside the path; other smaller channels take the ​water from the river and convey it through the gardens to the plants; the thick, heavy-looking water is the same colour as the earth—the colour of pinkish, greyish clay. Hardly any foreigners walk here—only a few Arabs; as they pass out of the sunlight, their white cloaks take on the colour of the shade.

I felt an odd shiver come over me as I stepped into that strange shade; I wrapped my shawl tighter about me; but it was not an unpleasant sensation; on the contrary. We sat down on a bench. Marceline was silent. Some Arabs passed by; then came a troop of children. Marceline knew several of them; she signed to them and they came up to us. She told me some of their names; questions and answers passed, smiles, pouts, little jokes. It all rather irritated me and my feeling of embarrassment returned. I was tired and perspiring. But, must I confess that what made me most uncomfortable was not the children's presence—it was Marceline's. Yes; however slightly, she was in my way. If I had got up, she would have followed me; if I had taken off my shawl, she would have wanted to carry it; if I had put it on again, she would have said, "Are you cold?" And then, as to talking to the children, I didn't dare to before her; I saw she ​had her favourites; I, in spite of myself, but deliberately, took more interest in the others.

"Let us go in," I said at last. And I privately resolved to come back to the gardens alone.

The next day, she had to go out about ten o'clock; I took advantage of this. Little Bachir, who rarely failed to come of a morning, carried my shawl; I felt active, light-hearted. We were almost alone in the garden path; I walked slowly, sometimes sat down for a moment, then started off again. Bachir followed, chattering; as faithful and as obsequious as a dog. I reached a part of the canal where the washerwomen come down to wash; there was a flat stone placed in the middle of the stream, and upon it lay a little girl, face downwards, dabbling with her hand in the water; she was busy throwing little odds and ends of sticks and grass into the water and picking them out again. Her bare feet had dipped in the water; there were still traces of wet on them and there her skin showed darker. Bachir went up and spoke to her; she turned round, gave me a smile and answered Bachir in Arabic. "She is my sister," he explained; then he said his mother was coming to wash some clothes and that his little sister was wait​ing for her. She was called Rhadra in Arabic, which meant 'Green.' He said all this in a voice that was as charming, as clear, as childlike, as the emotion I felt in hearing it.

"She wants you to give her two sous," he added.

I gave her fifty centimes and prepared to go on, when the mother, the washerwoman, came up. She was a magnificent, heavily built woman, with a high forehead tatooed in blue; she was carrying a basket of linen on her head and was like a Greek caryatid, like a caryatid too, she was simply draped in a wide piece of dark blue stuff, lifted at the girdle and falling straight to the feet.

As soon as she saw Bachir, she called out to him roughly. He made an angry answer; the little girl joined in and the three of them started a violent dispute. At last Bachir seemed defeated and explained that his mother wanted him that morning; he handed me my shawl sadly and I was obliged to go off by myself.

I had not taken twenty paces when my shawl began to feel unendurably heavy. I sat down, perspiring, on the first bench I came to. I hoped some other boy would come along and relieve me of my burden. The one who soon appeared and who offered to carry ​it of his own accord, was a big boy about fourteen years old, as black as a Soudanese and not in the least shy. His name was Ashour. I should have thought him handsome, but that he was blind of one eye. He liked talking; told me where the river came from, and that after running through the public gardens, it flowed into the oasis, which it traversed from end to end. As I listened to him, I forgot my fatigue. Charming as I thought Bachir, I knew him too well by now, and I was glad of a change. I even promised myself to come to the gardens all alone another day and sit on a bench and wait for what some lucky chance might bring.…

After a few more short rests, Ashour and I arrived at my door. I wanted to invite him to come in, but I was afraid to, not knowing what Marceline would say.

I found her in the dining-room, busied over a very small boy, so frail and sickly looking that my first feeling was one of disgust rather than pity. Marceline said rather timidly:

"The poor little thing is ill."

"It's not infectious, I hope. What's the matter with him?"

"I don't exactly know yet. He complains of feel​ing ill all over. He speaks very little French. When Bachir comes tomorrow, he will be able to interpret.… I am making him a little tea."

Then, as if in excuse, and because I stood there without saying anything, "I've known him a long time*," she added. "I haven't dared bring him in before; I was afraid of tiring you, or perhaps vexing you."

"Why in the world!" I cried. "Bring in all the children you like, if it amuses you!" And I thought, with a little irritation at not having done so, that I might have perfectly well brought up Ashour.

And yet, as I thought this, I looked at my wife: how maternal and caressing she was! Her tenderness was so touching that the little fellow went off warm and comforted. I spoke of my walk and gently explained to Marceline why I preferred going out alone.

At that time, my nights were generally disturbed by my constantly waking with a start—either frozen with cold or bathed in sweat. That night was a very good one. I hardly woke up at all. The next morning, I was ready to go out by nine o'clock. It was fine; I felt rested, not weak, happy—or rather, amused. The air was calm and warm, but neverthe​less, I took my shawl to serve as a pretext for making acquaintance with the boy who might turn up to carry it. I have said that the garden ran alongside our terrace, so that I reached it in a moment. It was with rapture I passed into its shade. The air was luminous. The cassias, whose flowers come very early, before their leaves, gave out a delicious scent—or was it from all around me that came the faint, strange perfume, which seemed to enter me by several senses at once and which so uplifted me? I was breathing more easily too, and so I walked more lightly; and yet at the first bench I sat down, but it was because I was excited—dazzled—rather than tired.

I looked. The shadows were transparent and mobile; they did not fall upon the ground—seemed barely to rest on it. Light! Oh, light!

I listened. What did I hear? Nothing; everything; every sound amused me.

I remember a shrub some way off whose bark looked of such a curious texture, that I felt obliged to go and feel it. My touch was a caress; it gave me rapture. I remember.… Was that the morning that was at last to give me birth?

I had forgotten I was alone, and sat on, expect​ing nothing, waiting for no-one, forgetting the time. Up till that day, so it seemed to me, I had felt so little and thought so much, that now I was astonished to find my sensations had become as strong as my thoughts.

I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own—recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life.

I met no-one that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer, which I had not opened since Marseilles, re-read three lines of the Odyssey and learnt them by heart; then, finding in their rhythm enough to satisfy me, I dwelt on them awhile with leisurely delight, shut the book, and sat still, trembling, more alive than I had thought it possible to be, my mind benumbed with happiness.…