A Camus (2009)
In a valley he lies under a rain. He lets the sky spit in his face so he has a reason to hate it. The drops of water feel like they are running wrinkles into his skin. He has removed his jacket so he can feel the damp earth through his shirt.
Despite his best efforts Camus cannot hate the sky and the world it rains on. Sitting up, he lights a cigarette. He coughs. Suddenly the smell of smoke makes him sick and he leaves it. His shoes, as he looks at them, are covered with bits of the countryside. The sides of the valley are falling apart under the pull of young streams of clay and stones. The rain is cold on his face. He tries to smell the earth but all he can perceive is the pomade that washes out of his hair.
The brown bulges of cloud in the sky take shapes. In them Camus can see images of all the violence he has ever witnessed. Over the mountains he sees family men whose hearts are drained of blood, dogs made entirely of bones, wives whose eyes are made of rain, their mouths crumbled in, collecting water.
He sees in this dark day a memory of the Sundays when he was young. He remembers the twilight of this day. Imperceptibly the daylight retreats away, though the darkness of night has not yet committed itself. Now Camus is trapped in the half-light which somehow always held for him a sense of fear. He coughs. He laughs at the idea of being scared because he is scared.
Now it seems to him that his heart is an old friend who he has never shared his secrets with. He wants to smoke again but he is not brave enough to pry his hands away from where they lie on top of his heart. In all the silences of the world he has forgotten the sound of that beating behind his ribs. The clouds are passing away.
His suit is soiled with red dirt. He wipes the moisture off his lips and smears mud on his face and learns not to worry about it. The walls of the valley are falling down.
Camus thinks he does not want more solitude. He feels in danger being left alone and questions when exactly he was given the responsibility to be himself. The sun is nowhere to be seen. A puddle forms around him. He removes his tie and makes a knot in it. The hands before him, formed of the earth he lies upon, slicked by the rain that is consuming him, seem strange. They lack a history he recognises.
Wearily he gets to his feet with the tie clenched between his fists. All actions now are being born again. He takes a new measure of the weight between him and his land. His polished shoes still reflect something of the grave sky. Looking out to the distant mountains he takes a step and slips back to the ground.
On his back again it feels like years are slipping past. He is accumulating moss as he lies there with his eyes closed. Abruptly the rainfall stops. Everything around him remembers how to be still again. But his heart surprises him as it starts up, and now, so clearly, he can hear it tick anxiously like a car indicator. He wonders where it is leading him.
* * *
I see Camus at a service station near Auxerre. He leans against a Facel Vega car looking into the distance away from the motorway. His eyes seem brighter than the world in front of him. It looks as though they are projecting out the distant clouds and shuffling treetops. I can see it all in his eyes there as he stands motionless.
And then he is watching a little girl who pets a dog in the back of the car. He lights a cigarette and smiles at her before turning back to the distant sky. The expression on his face is tired and content.
I stumble across the cement floor to get to him. When I am next to the car he turns to look at me with the same expression. We both smell the lingering cigarette smoke between us, which drifts off to the road where it is scattered everywhere.
Suddenly, from somewhere deep inside me, I am telling him about summer and death and being alone. I tell him everything I know though it all comes out disjointedly because of my poor French. I am tearing myself apart in front of him and he is silent. The cigarette hangs in his lips. His eyes have lost all of the colour I once saw there. And now I am holding his arms trying to get him to understand how we are the same and how we have always known each other. A man I don’t recognise comes and pulls me off Camus. There is a woman behind him who looks at me in horror.
I close my eyes for a moment because my head has started to hurt and my voice is hoarse. When I open them again Camus motions for the other man to let me go. I look into his eyes once again to find something there but it is gone. He nods at me once, slowly and carefully. Then all three of them get into the car and speed off.
Camus's cigarette smoulders on the cement floor but its smoke is rising straight upwards now. I watch the car slip away until I can’t see it anymore. The cigarette has stopped burning.