Free The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud Page B

son and not a potential companion. My appearance didn’t help much either. I’m not talking about my body, I’m talking about what a woman divines or desires in a man. Women have an intuition about what’s unfinished and avoid men who cling to their youthful doubts too long. Meriem was the only onewilling to defy my mother, even though she almost never met her and didn’t really know her except from running up against my silences and my hesitations. She and I saw each other about ten times that summer. Then we had a correspondence that lasted several months, and then she stopped writing to me and everything dissolved. Maybe because of a death or a marriage or a change of address. Who knows? There’s an old mailman in my neighborhood who wound up in prison because he’d fallen into the habit of throwing away his undelivered letters at the end of each day.
    Today’s Friday. It’s the day closest to death in my calendar. People dress ridiculously, they stroll through the streets at noon still wearing pajamas, practically, shuffling around in slippers as though Friday exempts them from the demands of civility. In our country, religious faith encourages laziness in private matters and authorizes spectacular negligence every Friday. You’d think men observed God’s day by being completely scruffy and slovenly. Have you noticed that people are dressing worse and worse? Without care, without elegance, without concern for the harmony of colors or nuances. Nothing. Old men like me, fond of red turbans, vests, bow ties, or beautiful, shiny shoes, are becoming rarer and rarer. We seem to be disappearing at the same rate as the public parks. It’s the Friday prayer hour I detest the most — and always have, ever since childhood, but even more for the past several years. The imam’s voice, shouting through the loudspeakers, the rolled-up prayer rugs tucked under people’s arms, the thundering minarets, the garish architecture of the mosque, and the hypocritical haste of thedevout on their way to water and bad faith, ablutions and recitations. You’ll see this spectacle everywhere on Friday, my friend — you’re not in Paris anymore. It’s almost always the same scene and has been for years. The neighbors start to stir, dragging their feet and moving slow, a long time after their pack of kids, who wake up early and swarm around, like maggots on my body. The new car gets washed and rewashed. Then there’s the sun, which runs its course uselessly on that eternal day, and the almost physical sensation of the idleness of the whole cosmos, reduced to balls that must be washed and verses that must be recited. Sometimes I get to thinking: Now that these people don’t have to go underground and the land is theirs, they don’t know where to go. Friday? It’s not a day when God rested, it’s a day when he decided to run away and never come back. I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough toknow what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?
    On Friday all the bars are closed and I have nothing to do. People look at me strangely, because despite my age I entreat no