The Outsider

• Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
• She said, “If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.” She was right. There was no way out.
• A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so.
• I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.
• "So why marry me, then?" she said. I explained to her that it didn't really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Besides, she was the one who was doing the asking and all I was saying was yes. Then she pointed out that marriage was a serious thing. I said, "No"
• "The sun was the same as it had been the day I'd buried Maman, and like then, my forehead especially was hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing under the skin."
• "I probably did love Maman, but that didn't mean anything … I explained to him … that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings."
• "Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?"
• "But everybody knows life isn't worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy"
• "As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."