by Salim Bachi
“Well… no, I don’t.”
“I thought as much! This shabby residence! This accursed villa! It’s hell. People disappear into here and forget who they are.”
Although the fuss he was making and his exclamations sounded put on or overdone, my evening visitor seemed in earnest. He was gazing at me as if I were the embodiment of an old dream. He took my hand as if holding a child’s hand and talked about Sinbad’s adventures—my adventures.
He told me the story of Sinbad the Sailor who invited Sinbad the Porter to dine in his huge house, pretty much the same way I’ve brought you here to the house of my grandmother, Lalla Fatima, to tell you the story of my life.
To my amazement, Sinbad the Sailor, my oriental double, embarked on the tale of his voyages, his shipwrecks, his dramatic downfalls and his spectacular fortunes. And I, Sinbad the Porter, listened as if trying to fathom my double’s soul and gaze at my reflection in a shifting mirror of words.
“I inherited considerable property from my father, the greater part of which I squandered in my youth on a life of dissipation, but I soon realized the error of my ways and reflected that riches did not last long when mismanaged in such a way. I also reflected that my irregular lifestyle had led me to fritter away my time, which is the most precious thing of all.
“And I thought that being poor in old age was the worst and most regrettable of all misfortunes. I remembered noble Solomon’s saying: ‘The grave is better than want.’
“So I gathered together what remained of my fortune and sold all my goods and chattels by public auction in Baghdad’s market. This was easy to do since the town of Caliph Harun-al-Rashid was also the home of the merchants whose stalls surrounded the palace of the Commander of the Faithful. Baghdad was laid out in concentric circles like an astrolabe. It was as round as the moon. In this town, I met some merchants who travelled the seas and who were excellent men. They had a haughty demeanour, wore moustaches and shaved their beards, which wasn’t the custom in our country; they flouted the laws of hospitality, too, because they never lodged with their fellow merchants in Baghdad, preferring to stay in fonduks, those strange inns where you might meet every kind of creature on the good Lord’s earth. Having struck up a friendship with several of these rogues, I left for Basra where I boarded one of their vessels.
“We set sail, steering our course towards the country of Hind.
“During our voyage, we landed at several islands, where we sold or exchanged our goods. One day, while under sail, we were becalmed near a small island, which was not much higher than the level of the water and looked like a meadow. The captain ordered his sails to be furled and allowed anyone to go on shore who wished to do so; I was one of those who disembarked. But while we were enjoying drinking copious amounts of wine, eating abundant dried meats and salted fruits, and swimming through azure waters to the distant horizon and then back to rest on this welcoming shore, the island suddenly shook with a terrible tremor. What we had thought was an island was the back of a whale. The quickest and most agile of us escaped in the rowboat or threw themselves into the sea and swam back to the ship; I was held back by the waves, and so saw the captain hoist his sails and continue his voyage, leaving me to my fate.
“I struggled against the elements for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, exhausted and in danger of being claimed by the wine-dark sea, I was lifted by a huge wave and tossed onto the shore, like Odysseus on the island of the Phaeacians. But I was even more alone than industrious Odysseus, the man of a thousand turns, since there was no Nausicaa waiting to lead me to her people.
“I fell asleep, my strength gone, for a very long time.
“I was ravenously hungry when I woke up, so I went in search of food. But all I found were pasturelands grazed by huge horses; I was already picturing myself capturing and eating them when a man suddenly appeared from under the earth, as in those ludicrous old stories.
“The man asked me who I was and I told him all about my misfortunes. I think he took pity on me because he led me into a cave, where several other people were waiting. He introduced me to them and they prepared a meal for me, which revived me. These men were the grooms of a certain Mirage, whom they said was their king. They had come to this island with the king’s mares, which they tied to pickets on the shore to wait for stallions from the sea to cover them and impregnate them. Then, before these sea stallions could devour the mares, the men would come out of their hiding places, shouting to frighten away the terrible sea creatures, which would return to Poseidon. The mares impregnated in this fashion were taken back to the king. There they gave birth to sea horses that were azure and silver like the waves, fearsome in war and faster at the gallop than the best horses on earth.
“Once their work was finished, the grooms took me to their island and presented me to King Mirage, whose kingdom, despite being illusory, numbered thousands of islands scattered over a vast sea. While I was waiting for people from my own land to arrive, the king showered me with costly gifts and, in return, I told him the story of my life and described the disaster that had almost cost my life and had resulted in my exile. I had been lucky in my misfortune; unlike illustrious Odysseus, I had no wife or son. Penelope wasn’t waiting for me beside her loom, and Telemachus wasn’t attacking youths of his own age at the risk of losing his life or, worse, his reason.
“Then, one day, the ship that had abandoned me to the waves dropped anchor by King Mirage’s island. When I managed to convince them that I was the one and only Sinbad, not a ghost or, worse, an imposter—of whom there will be many more, I fear, as my life and novel travel through the centuries—the captain gave me back my goods and agreed to take me on board. Before I left, King Mirage showered me with many gifts and I returned to Baghdad even richer than before.”
IX
BUT SINBAD was getting away from the storyteller, the man in the big hat who claimed to be a painter of odalisques, just as he’d once got away from the monkey-man who was going to roast him on a spit and eat him: he’d gouged out that monster’s eyes just as Odysseus had done to his Cyclops, and had escaped with his companions by hanging from the fleece of a sheep. And the painter of idols watched him disappear into the distance towards Basra, returning at last, experienced and knowledgeable, to die among his own people, a figure larger than the story trying to imprison him.
Sinbad was immortal: he was reborn with every new generation and reincarnated as a young man with a wayfaring soul, his bag empty and his eyes filled with wonders, who always washed up in a foreign town with incomprehensible customs, just as he himself had washed up on a beach and had been picked up by a young woman with burning, salty skin. But the picture that the great Ingres intended to paint frightened me to death. I was terrified of ending up imprisoned by the canvas the way Giovanna had been by the Academy’s elderly director, Paduzzi di Balto.
So, with an entirely oriental gentleness, I sent the spectre in the floppy hat packing and closed the door behind him. I could breathe freely again at last; my heartbeat could return to normal and my mind could rest easy after all that excitement. I’d had more than enough of the Villa, its residents and its illustrious dead; even Giovanna was exhausting me with her obsessive sexual demands. I sorted out my things. I didn’t have much, just a few shirts, a couple of pairs of trousers, and some socks and boxer shorts. I opened a suitcase and threw the lot inside.
Like my illustrious ancestor, the Sinbad of legend, I boarded a ship at Genoa, not Basra, and sailed along the coast to Messina in Sicily. The crossing was short and the voyage comfortable, compared to my earlier one. This was a ferry, not a fishing boat, and no one was in danger of dying of thirst or ending up at the bottom of the sea or, worse, locked up in a humanitarian-aid camp. So I allowed myself to drift for a night, sitting in an armchair, surrounded by the snoring of other passengers and the soft lapping of the sea.
Messina was a strange, ugly town, built beside the straits.
A stroll by the sea yielded a
certain transient charm, particularly when thinking about Odysseus trying to avoid being caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Sinbad the sailor was trying to find the channel which would let him continue his voyage to Ithaca. This was yet another of his old stories which was of interest to no one except a few elderly scholars locked in a library’s forbidden-book section. The youth of today preferred new technology to ancient knowledge. Who could blame them? Wasn’t it better to download mindless music than read the Odyssey? Or chat to people all over the world without ever getting to know them properly—which was preferable really—instead of getting lost in the pages of a book with fanatical egocentricity.
People wanted to be connected with everyone at all costs. The only thing limiting the virtual universe was its own virtuality. The most effective, most lethal prisons were those we created for ourselves with a computer, an Internet connection and a total indifference to reality. An ignorant disregard for the rest of the planet. People had friends all over the world but had never met any of them. People carried on passionate relationships with strangers who could alter their sex and identity at will. You could take part in a protest for Tibet or Afghanistan just by clicking on a link, forgetting that the torturers were employing a harder kind of technology that bore little relation to software.
Anyone could influence a foreign government that didn’t allow its subjects to access this marvel of technology and instantaneous information, just by adding their names to an online petition.
Proteus, the shape-changing God, was master of this global sham.
Contemporary tastes therefore required a permanent presence, a perpetual state of wakefulness, but one without quality or flavour. Modern man simply had to be able to absorb all this pointless knowledge and be in possession of an elephantine memory to do so. Even a 100MB hard disk was more valuable than an active brain. Odysseus was now reduced to a computer virus, a Trojan Horse, a vicious line of code that had to be deleted as fast as possible. The man of a thousand turns was consigned to the past because there was no processor fast enough to cope with him.
The god known as Norton naturally watched over the unassailable Troy of our futile capacities, the thousands of hours vaporized by watching amorphous images, reading aimless lines and, just like geese, gobbling up scraps of information provided by our Aeolus. Online newspapers were a lot of hot air; no one read them any more anyway, and the serious press was dying, unable to compete with games, music for free—the magic word of the century—and video on demand. Keeping informed was easy with all those blogs that allowed everyone to air their views about nothing. This e-commerce café was a serious danger to the planet’s mental health. The future of democracy was a never-ending debate somewhere on the Net.
This huge knowledge base was no use to anyone and, what was worse, it made people powerless; they stored the data so that it was even easier for them to ignore it. In this way, the human race was merrily preparing to take a giant leap into oblivion.
Messina was very similar to this new world. The city had been struck by a great tidal wave early in the last century and had been rebuilt on top of the ruins of the baroque town. Baroque had been abandoned in favour of the 1900s style—everything that was attractive and new in the early twentieth century. But, after Poseidon, Mars came along and devastated the terrible city. American bombers reduced it to ashes in the Second World War.
It was rebuilt again. Hastily.
Now it looked faded, dreary and tacky, like the last in a long line of reproductions. Its soul was dead. No doubt its inhabitants, tired of so many disasters, weren’t about to build anything to last. They had to be able to take it down before the next performance; to change the scenery before the tragedy.
I’d lived in Carthago for many years, another disaster-ridden town, so Messina was a city after my own heart. It touched anyone who was disenchanted or nostalgic for gory comedies. I was continually reliving a wretched past as I walked its streets. I was strolling through the kingdom of the dead. Anyway, the inhabitants of Messina were the saddest people in Sicily. They were waiting, with a certain amount of trepidation, for the bridge promised by the Golem that would link the tip of Calabria to their sunken city.
I might well have tired of so much misery if I hadn’t met Liza.
She was a receptionist at the hotel where I was staying. She was wearing a wedding ring, which was the first thing I noticed, since I hadn’t yet experienced adultery. I soon remedied this oversight, since we found ourselves together in the same room one evening when it was raining, the hotel was deserted and its guests seemed to have disappeared into the city’s limbo.
Liza was slender as a reed, a pale yellow reed like the ones my father and I used for making fishing rods. Back then, we had to suspend the long pole over the fire and heat it so that it acquired the flexibility and strength needed for the hazardous activity of fishing on the shores of Carthago at night, or at daybreak when the sun, still below the horizon, illuminates the water which turns emerald, then clear. At that precise moment, the sea would fill with fish and the rods, embedded in the sand and topped by a little bell, would snap in half with a tinkling of bells to signal a bite. We would then frantically race over to seize the long rod and land the fish.
I would remember those mornings by the sea as I held Liza in my arms. The young woman trembled like the taut line linking the catch to the fisherman. Highly charged, she was shaking like a leaf, so badly that, to calm her, I told her about those nights with my father on the long beaches of Carthago, where the Romans once landed before torching the city. But Liza burned even hotter than the ramparts of that trading city, she was set on fire by my caresses, while I went under like a siren embraced by an Odysseus who wasn’t so tightly bound to his ship. What kind of adventure would the famous sailor have had if he’d been prepared to join the sirens singing for him? Man will never know and will always daydream about this missed encounter.
The child I once was would have let himself be carried off in the arms of the women who sang so well, just as in Messina, trapped between Liza’s thighs, netted by her breathing and her song, quivering like a sea bream or leer fish hooked on a line, I was held captive by the will of a woman tense as the breaking day and relentless as a kiss. Adultery is the song of the sirens, drifting slowly with endless patience, knowing that you will eventually lose your life or your soul. No one gave Liza any love now in Messina—a cold, dead town stuck in a past filled with bombing raids and earthquakes—so she preferred to lose her soul there: it was one way of proving she still had one.
I explored her stomach like a new shore and kissed her small breasts that flushed red under my tongue. Then she reared, like a caught fish which refuses to surrender and thrashes about, then escapes, fluid and silvery. Between Liza’s damp thighs, on top of her stomach, flat as the shores of Sirte, I wondered how to escape the catastrophe brewing beneath the caresses and murmurs. My warped sailor’s mind continued to hold onto the pure, intact image of Vitalia who, like a Penelope, was my one true love, my talisman against the sweetest of evil charms, like a fiery wife whose singing is both sheer delight and sheer torture.
Liza, like Beatrice, didn’t try to stop me leaving when, one morning, I picked up my suitcase and left the hotel, kissing her slender hand one last time. My memories of that husbandless wife were tender yet bitter. She’d brought back my childhood and the image of a father who’d disappeared among the sirens, blinded by the cold, metallic brilliance of the sea, a shattered mirror that would last till the end of time. Perhaps my ongoing desire for travel and for women should be regarded as a discreet homage to the father who’d strayed after mistaking false love for the one true love? If only my mother hadn’t died, abandoning her Odysseus to all kinds of pretenders, vandals and murderers, to the Calypsos and Circes who inhabited the infernal regions of this world and who brandished unrealistic promises and sang glorious songs, cold as the seabed. I was soon left an orphan, raised by my grandmother among mirages and cock-and-bull stories, soothed often
by foolish dreams while Carthago foundered, sinking into barbarism.
ITRAVELLED TO SYRACUSE. I liked the town, which made me feel strangely lethargic. I felt that I could breathe more freely walking through the narrow lanes, over the Piazza del Duomo, strolling along the boardwalk, a balcony suspended over the ocean, the dream of sailors or merchants setting out on expeditions for a thousand years. But, like a wife or an abandoned whore, I stayed on the quay, gazing into the dream-filled depths. I imagined Archimedes erecting his mirrors to burn the Roman ships, a popular legend that had been masquerading as truth since time immemorial. It was a wonder that men seemed to prefer tall stories to tangible proof, even if it was dry as straw. They preferred the mystery of the heavens to the mathematical order of the world.
I also remembered the Arabs who invited themselves to Syracuse in the ninth century, when they were still sailing on strange, fragile crafts that could cross oceans, as Sinbad, the one from the legend, liked to relate.
I tried to forget my loneliness, the strange, nagging impression that I was continually reliving the same things, as if my story belonged to everyone. I travelled, but everyone travelled. I went from one woman to the next in search of Vitalia, but everyone spent their life like this, moving from one embrace to another, from one face to another, mistaking the image of love for true love and ending up with nothing. People grew old, their memories faded, they finished their lives alone and went to the grave and eternal oblivion. Life is nothing. An illusion. Like the ever-moving waves pulsing in the light.
I would have liked to be wrong, to believe in an afterlife, something to make up for all the sorrow we experience in life. The worst part was thinking that everything we’d lived through had been in vain and would disappear with the death of that vessel of marvels or sorrows, the demise of the person of flesh and feathers: body, dreams, mind and desires which had once been in the light and were now conspicuous by their absence. The Sailor’s true wealth resided in his good fortune in being able to reinvent himself through his women and his voyages; and if there was no rhyme or reason to that, if it were just free verse, just poetry doomed to be scattered to the wind like an ephemeral word, then who cared? The important thing was not to be weighed down by baggage—you had to travel light, taking only the bare minimum for moral comfort.