The Outsider by Camus Albert Smith Sandra

Author:Camus, Albert, Smith, Sandra [Camus, Albert, Smith, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141904252
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-03T20:00:00+00:00

2

There are certain things I’ve never liked talking about. I realized after my first few days in prison that I wouldn’t like to talk about that part of my life.

Later on such things no longer bothered me: they weren’t important. To tell the truth, I wasn’t really in prison the first few days: I was just vaguely waiting for something new to happen. It was only after the first and only time Marie visited me that everything began. From the day I received her letter (she told me they wouldn’t let her come because she wasn’t my wife), from that day on, I felt as if my cell was my home and that my life would end there. The day I was arrested, I was locked up in a room with several prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. They asked me what I’d done. I said I’d killed an Arab and they all went quiet. But a short time later, night fell. They showed me how to set up the mat where I would sleep. By rolling up one of the ends, you could make a sort of pillow. Bugs crawled across my face all night long. A few days later, I was put in a cell by myself where I slept on a wooden bed. I had a bucket for a toilet and a metal washbowl. The prison was right at the top of the town and I could see the sea through a little window. One day, I was holding on to the bars of the window, my face raised towards the sun, when a guard came in and told me I had a visitor. I thought it must be Marie. I was right.

To get to the visitors’ area, I walked down a long corridor, then up a flight of stairs and finally down another corridor. I went into a very large, very bright room lit by an enormous bay window. The room was divided into three sections by two large sets of bars that ran down it lengthwise. Between the two sets of bars there was a gap of eight to ten metres that separated the prisoners from the visitors. I saw Marie sitting opposite me; her face was tanned and she was wearing her striped dress. There were ten prisoners or so on my side, most of them Arabs. Marie was surrounded by Arab women and sat between two other visitors: a little old woman with pursed lips dressed all in black and a bare-headed fat woman who spoke very loudly while making lots of gestures. Because of the distance between them, the visitors and the prisoners had to talk very loudly. When I first came in, I felt rather dizzy because of the blaring voices echoing between the large bare walls of the room and the blinding sunlight pouring in through the windows. My cell was quieter and darker. It took me a few seconds to adjust. But then I could see each face clearly, outlined against the bright daylight.

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