Irony by Albert Camus (Part 1 of Betwixt and Between)
L'Ironie dans L'Envers et l'endroit (heretofore untranslated)
Two years ago, I knew an old woman. She suffered from a malady from which she thought she would die. Her entire right side had been paralyzed. She had only one half of herself in this world while the other half was already a stranger. A garrulous, energetic, little old woman, she had been reduced to silence and immobility. Long days alone, illiterate, insensitive, her entire life came down to God. She believed in him. And the evidence is that she had a rosary, a lead Christ, and, in stucco, Saint-Joseph portant l'enfant Jésus. She doubted that her malady was incurable, but asserted it so that people would be interested in her, entrusting the rest to the God she loved so badly.
That day, someone took an interest in her. It was a young man. (He believed that there was truth and knew, furthermore, that this woman would die, without concerning himself to resolve this contradiction.) He had taken a veritable interest in the old woman’s ennui. She had felt this well. And this interest was an unexpected godsend for the sick woman. She told him of her sorrows with liveliness: she was at the end of her rope, and it is important to give way to the youth. Was she bored? That was certain. Nobody talked to her. She was in her corner, like a dog. It was better to get it over with. Because she would rather die than be a burden on someone.
Her voice was becoming quarrelsome. It was a marketplace voice, a bargaining voice. However, this young man understood. He was of the opinion, nevertheless, that it was better to be a burden on others than to die. But this proved only one thing: that, doubtlessly, he had never been dependent on anyone. And precisely he said to the old woman — because he had seen the rosary: “You have the good God.” It was true. But even in this respect, this still bored her. If she happened to remain a long moment in prayer, if her gaze was lost in pattern of the tapestry, her daughter would say: “There she goes praying again!” - “What does it matter to you?” said the sick woman. - “It’s nothing to me, but it irritates me in the end.” And the old woman was silent, fixing on her daughter a long, reproachful gaze.
The young man listened to everything with an immense, unknown sorrow that bothered him in his chest. And the old woman said still: “She will see when she is old. She, too, will need it.”
One felt that this old woman was liberated from everything, except from God, yielded over entirely to this last evil, virtuous by necessity, too easily persuaded by that which remained to her was the only good worthy of love, plunged finally and irrevocably into the misery of man in God. But let the hope of life be reborn and God is not the force against the interest of man.
We sat at the table. The young man had been invited to dinner. The old woman did not eat, because food is heavy in the evening. She remained in her corner, behind the back of the one who listened to her. And feeling observed, he ate badly. Nevertheless, dinner progressed. To prolong this meeting, we decided to go to the cinema. A cheerful film was playing. The young man had thoughtlessly accepted, without thinking about who continued to exist behind his back.
The guests had risen to go wash their hands before leaving. There was no question, evidently, that the old woman would come too. When she would not have been impotent, her ignorance would have prevented her from comprehending the film. She said she did not like movies. In truth, she did not understand them. She was in her corner, moreover, and took a great empty interest to the beads of her rosary. She put all her trust in him. The three objects she kept marked for her the material point where the divine began. From the rosary, Christ, or Saint Joseph, beyond them, opened a deep black void where she placed all her hope.
Everyone was ready. We approached the old woman to embrace her and wish her a good evening. She had already understood and clamped her rosary with force. Although it seemed that the gesture could as be as much out of despair than fervor. We kissed her. Only the young man remained. He squeezed the woman’s hand with affection and started to turn around to leave. But the woman saw leave that who was interested in her. She did not want to be alone. She already felt the horror of her solitude, the prolonged insomnia, the disappointing tête-à-tête with God. She was afraid, now relying only on man, and attaching to the only being who would have shown interest in her, did not release his hand, squeezed it, awkwardly thanking him to justify this insistence. The young man was embarrassed. Already, the others turned to urge him to hurry. The show began at 2100 and it was better to arrive a little early so as not to wait at the counter.
He felt confronted with the most dreadful misfortune that he had ever known: that of an old, sick woman abandoned so others could go to the cinema. He wanted to leave and hide, not wanting to know, and tried to withdraw his hand. For a second, he had a ferocious hatred for this old woman and thought to slap her violently.
He was finally able to withdraw and leave while the sick woman, half-raised in her fauteuil, saw with horror the only certainty in which she relied on vanished. Nothing protected her now. Yielding entirely to the thought of her death, she did not know exactly what frightened her, but felt that she did not want to be alone. God was useless to her, except only to remove her from people and render her alone. She did not want to leave them. That’s why she started to cry.
The others were already in the street. A tenacious remorse plagued the young man. He lifted his eyes toward the illuminated window, a big dead eye in the silent house. The eye closed. The old, sick woman’s daughter said to the young man: “She always turns off the light when she is alone. She loves to stay in the dark.”
* * *
This old man was triumphant, drawing his eyebrows together and shaking a sententious finger. He said, “My father gave me five francs weekly to amuse myself until the following Saturday. Well, I still found a way to put money aside. First, to go see my fiancée, I traveled four kilometers into the countryside and four kilometers back. I’m telling you, today’s youth no longer know how to have fun.” They were around a round table, three young people, and him, old. He recounted his poor adventures: nonsense held in high regard, lassitudes he celebrated as victories. He spared no silences in his story, and, pressed to say everything before being left, he remembered from his past what he thought would touch his listeners. Being listened to was his only vice: he refused to see the irony of looks and mocking brusqueness with which they overwhelmed him. For them, he was the old man who said everything was better in his time when he thought he was the respected grandfather whose experience carries weight. The young people do not know that experience is a defeat and that one must lose everything to know a little. He had suffered. He said nothing of it. It’s better to appear happy. And then, if he was wrong in this, he would have been heavily mistaken by wanting, on the contrary, to touch them with his misfortunes. What do the sufferings of an old man matter when life occupies you entirely? He talked, talked, went astray with delight in the gloom of his deafened voice. But this could not last. His pleasure commanded an end, and the attention of his listeners was declining. He was no longer amusing; he was old. And the young love billiards and cards, which do not resemble the foolish work of every day.
He was soon alone, despite his efforts and lies to render his story more attractive. Inconsiderately, the young people left. Alone again. No longer listened to: that’s what’s so terrible when you’re old. He was condemned to silence and solitude. He was told that he would soon die. And an old man about to die is useless, even annoying and insidious. Let him go. Otherwise, keep him quiet: it’s the slightest courtesy. And he suffers because he cannot be silent without thinking he is old. Yet, he rose and left, smiling at everyone around him. But he only met indifferent faces or those shaken with gaiety to which he had no right to participate. A man laughed: “She’s old, I would not say no, but sometimes it’s in the old pots that we make the best soups.” Another, already more serious: “We’re not rich, but we eat well. You see, my grandson eats more than his father. His father needs a pound of bread; he needs a kilo! And go with the sausage, go with the camembert. Sometimes, when he’s finished, he says, ‘Han! Han!’ and he eats more.” The old man walked away. With his slow step, a little donkey’s step at work, he traveled the long sidewalks full of people. He felt terrible and didn’t want to return home. Usually, he quite liked to return to the table and the kerosene lamp, the plates where his fingers found their place mechanically. He still loved the silent supper, the old woman sitting before him, mouthfuls chewed slowly, the mind empty, the eyes fixed and dead. Tonight, he would return late. Supper would be served cold, and the old woman would be in bed without worry since she knew of his unexpected delays. She said, “He has the moon,” and all that was said.
He walked now in the soft stubbornness of his step. He was alone and old. At the end of life, old age returns as nausea. All this leads to is not being listened to. He walks, turns a corner, stumbles, and almost falls. I saw it. It’s ridiculous, but what can you do? Nevertheless, he prefers the street, the street, rather than those hours when, at home, fever masks the old woman and isolates him in his room. Then, the door slowly opens occasionally and remains half-open for a moment. A man enters. He is dressed in light. He sits down facing the old man and remains silent for long minutes. He is motionless, like the door just now, gaping. From time to time, he passes a hand over his hair and sighs softly. He leaves silently when he has looked at the old man for a long time with the same heavy, sad gaze. Behind him, a harsh noise falls from the latch and the old man remains there, horrified, with an acid and painful fear in his stomach. While in the street, he’s not alone despite the few people he meets. His fever sings. His small steps quicken: tomorrow, everything will change, tomorrow. Suddenly, he discovers this: that tomorrow will be similar, and the day after tomorrow, all the other days. And this irremediable discovery crushes him. These are the ideas that make you die. Unable to bear them, you kill yourself — or if you are young, you make sentences out of them.
Old, mad, drunk, who knows. His end will be worthy, sobbing, admirable. He will die en beauté, I mean to say suffering. That will be a consolation for him. And besides, where to go: he is old forever. Men build upon the old age to come. To this old age, assailed by the irremediableness, they want to give idleness that leaves them defenseless. They want to be foremen and retire in a small villa. But once they’ve entered old age, they know it’s false. They need other men to protect them. And for him, he needed to be listened to in order to believe in his life. Now, the streets were darker and emptier. Voices still passed by. In the strange appeasement of the evening, they became more solemn. Behind the hills that encircled the city, there were still glimmers of daylight. Smoke, imposing, and of unknown origin, appeared behind the wooded ridges. Slowly, it rose and sprawled out like a fir. The old man closed his eyes. Facing the life that carried away the city’s rumblings and the sky’s indifferent, silly smile, he was alone, distraught, naked, already dead.
Is it necessary to describe the reverse of this beautiful medal? One can imagine that in a dirty and dark room, the old woman was setting the table — that dinner was ready; she sat down, looked at the time, still waited, and began to eat with appetite. She thought: “He has the moon.” All had been said.
* * *
They lived as five: the grandmother, her youngest son, her eldest daughter, and the latter’s two children. The son was practically mute; the daughter, infirm, had difficulty thinking, and as for the two children, one already worked for an insurance company while the youngest continued his studies. At seventy years old, the grandmother still dominated all these people. Above her bed, one could see a portrait of her where, five years younger, standing straight in a black robe closed at the neck by a medallion, without a wrinkle, with immense, clear, cold eyes, she had that regal bearing that she only resigned with age and sometimes tried to regain in the street.
To these clear eyes, her grandson owed a memory that still made him blush. The old woman waited for visitors to ask him, fixing him with a severe gaze: “Who do you prefer, your mother or grandmother?” The game became more intense when the mother herself was present. For in all cases, the child would answer: “My grandmother,” with, in his heart, a significant surge of love for his mother, who always remained silent. Or, when the visitors were astonished by this preference, the mother would say, “She’s the one who raised him.”
The old woman also believed that love is something one demands. She drew from her conscience, as a good mother, a kind of rigidity and intolerance. She had never deceived her husband and had borne him nine children. After his death, she raised her small family with energy. Having left their suburban farm, they had ended up in an old poor neighborhood, where they lived for a long time.
And indeed, this woman did not lack qualities. But, for her grandsons, who were at the edge of absolute judgments, she was nothing but a performer. They inherited a significant story from one of their uncles. This uncle, coming to visit his mother-in-law, had seen her inactive at the window. But she had received him with a cloth and apologized for continuing her work due to the little time that household chores left her. And it must be admitted that everything was like this. She fainted easily after a family discussion. She also suffered from painful vomiting due to a liver disease. But she showed no discretion in exercising her illness. Far from isolating herself, she vomited noisily in the kitchen garbage can. After returning to her family pale, eyes full of tears from the effort, if they beseeched her to lie down, she reminded them of the kitchen work she had to do and her role in running the house: “I do everything around here.” And again: “What would become of you if I disappeared!”
The children became accustomed to ignoring her vomiting, her “attacks,” as she called them, and her complaints. One day, she was bedridden and demanded a doctor. They had one come to please her. On the first day, he detected a simple malaise; on the second day, live cancer; and on the third day, severe jaundice. But the youngest of the two children stubbornly saw this as another comedy, a more refined simulation. He was not worried. This woman had oppressed him too much for his initial views to be pessimistic. And there was a kind of desperate courage in the clarity and refusal to love. But by playing sick, one can indeed feel it: the grandmother pushed the simulation to the point of death. On the last day, assisted by her children, she relieved herself of her intestinal fermentations. With simplicity, she addressed her grandson: “You see,” she said, “I fart like a little pig.” She died an hour later.
Her grandson, he was now convinced, had understood nothing about it. He couldn’t shake the idea that he had just witnessed the last and most monstrous of this woman’s performances. And when he questioned himself regarding the pain he felt, he couldn’t detect any. Only on the day of the funeral, due to the general explosion of tears, did he cry, but with the fear of being insincere and lying in the face of death. It was a beautiful winter day, pierced by rays of sunlight. One could feel the cold in the blue sky, all speckled with yellow. The cemetery dominated the city, and one could see the beautiful, transparent sun falling on the bay, trembling with light like a moist lip.
* * *
All that doesn’t reconcile? The beautiful truth. A woman abandoned for the cinema, an old man no longer listened to, and a death that redeems nothing, and then, on the other side, all the light in the world. How does it feel if we accept everything? It’s a matter of three similar yet different destinies. Death for all, but each to their own death. After all, the sun still warms our bones.
Translated by Robert Sweet (2024)
Albert Camus, born in Algeria in 1913, published The Stranger–now one of the most widely read novels of this century–in 1942. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.