The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor

by Salim Bachi

  “Draw a line under that episode, my dear Sinbad. Look around you…”

  He gestured at the female students walking back up towards the Sorbonne or the Louis-le-Grand lycée.

  “No shortage of research subjects.”

  “No love in the son of the Mohammedan’s heart.”

  “Sounds like Mao, but not really. Like some of the local philosophers. You know who they are. You’re the intellectual, after all. Since you’ve been studying… I mean the guys who once marched from Nation to the Bastille and who now merrily sink cocktails at the Flore and give the Prince advice on procedure.”

  Of course, I could see that philosophy always ended up in the gutter and turned tricks for media pimps. The companions of Chu En-Lai, Che and Castro had embarked on an anti-Muslim crusade. Anybody whose ancestor had set foot in a mosque was a potential fascist, a neo-Nazi killer of good women, a destroyer of freedoms, an emasculator and a genocidist. It wasn’t easy for me or Robinson to be called potential despots: we’d fled the tyranny of Ubu, the Grand Inquisitor and the Top Mullah. It was depressing to be lumped together with veil agitators, Qur’an devourers and Osama’s Septembrists and chucked into the Seine. But that’s the West for you: it has a boundless capacity for generalization.

  XIII

  HÉRODE DIDN’T LIKE ANYONE. There was one exception: an Angora cat called Proust, which he’d just taken in and which went everywhere with him; he carried it clasped to his breast, stroking it and declaiming a poem written during the night. The poem always appealed to the cat, which was his best, most discerning and loudest purring critic.

  “Oh! If only everyone could be like Proust!”

  “But, darling, Proust is a cat.”

  “France, you’re really getting on my nerves!”

  He would then lock himself in France’s small apartment on the ground floor of the apartment block, and wouldn’t come out again that day. He put in some more time on Le Bouton d’Anaïs, then polished it further. The workaholic spent hours shining up that novel which had been rejected by every publishing house worthy of the title, and then, abandoning this by now almost lifeless work, he got down to his collection of poetry, Il y a du Bouleau, immortal pieces celebrating the Russian forests. Hérode, born in Mali, dreamt of the deathless Russia of authors such as Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak.

  “My dear Sinbad, open your eyes, open them wide!”

  Hérode then began obsessively consulting Proust, who didn’t much like his heavy-handed petting and hightailed it to the living room where he hid under an armchair.

  “Come back, Proust; here, dear Proust, come here!”

  But Proust didn’t come back and Hérode, who felt that his authority was being flouted, seethed with anger.

  “True literature doesn’t give a damn about minor works penned by your hacks! You should read Tolstoy, Yesenin or Mayakovsky instead, geniuses we should be imitating the way Leonardo imitated Verrocchio. I’ll bet you’ve never been to Florence, my dear Sinbad.”

  “I know the city of the Pazzi very well.”

  “Who are the Pazzi?”

  Hérode had never set foot in Florence. Since he didn’t have a residence permit, there was no way he could leave French territory. The only journey the great poet was likely to make was to be bundled onto a charter flight under the indifferent gaze of the other passengers.

  One day, France took me to one side and said, “Hérode is beside himself with jealousy. He thinks you… Sinbad, you’ll have to leave. I know someone who’ll rent you a studio in Montmartre. Sometimes he flies into such terrible rages. He thinks everyone is against him, and that no one recognizes his genius. He’s under so much pressure, you understand. If he didn’t have Proust, he’d have thrown himself out of the window by now.”

  “You live on the ground floor!”

  “You do understand, don’t you, Sinbad? An African in Paris. With a white woman. If you saw the way people look at us in the street. Don’t forget what happened on the seventeenth of October, 1961. Four hundred odd Algerians in the Seine and Papon the Nazi congratulated by De Gaulle. And long before that, the Vichy collaborators were in Paris too, don’t forget. This city doesn’t like strangers, Sinbad.”

  The City of Lights was a myth that had been exported all over the world in the early twentieth century. What’s more, it was the only French creation, along with Camembert and Bordeaux, that was in high demand from the American tourists praising the light in August. Sartre, Camus, Foucault and Derrida were forgotten, Mondrian and Zadkine tossed aside. All that was left were the Sollers, the rearguard Combazes and the not-so-new Nouvels. A depressing period and a depressing city which now tracked down foreigners, drove out all the Picassos and Modiglianis, and shoved them onto planes so that they could be spewed out somewhere else. Of course, there was still the American Way of Life with its Hollywood bubblegum, a lure which worked for some overseas writers from the Caribbean who championed Créolité and other types of nonsense rubbished by Hérode as he stroked Proust.

  So I took up residence in the heart of the myth, in Montmartre, in a strange, lopsided house on Rue d’Orchampt. I liked the district and the low rent. When the weather was good, I walked up Rue Lepic, past the Moulin de la Galette, took Rue Norvins or Rue Sainte-Rustique to Rue du Mont-Cenis, which used to be called Rue Saint-Denis. I always sat at a table in the same café, opposite the tourist shops whose windows displayed ridiculous T-shirts printed with an Eiffel Tower or a Sacré-Coeur. The street looked like a souk, which rather appealed to me, and I swore that one day I’d visit the caravanserais of Aleppo and the huge market in Damascus.

  In Rue du Mont-Cenis, I watched hordes of young women from every country in the world strutting past in God’s light. Another man might have complained about this never-ending influx of people, the continual upheaval endangering the district, disfiguring it so badly that it made you wonder whether the Commune had ever really happened here, if the blood that once flowed here hadn’t really been grenadine, if Montmartre was still hidden beneath Montmartre. This thorny enigma was likely to cause a new rift among the bobos, the bohemian bourgeois who had made their money from the film industry and were now pushing their prams along the streets of the ‘Butte Rouge’.

  Me, I didn’t care, I was as blasé as a Roman. I’d gained composure. I no longer believed in anything; I didn’t even miss Vitalia any more. I was lost to love, I devoured women the way other men might eat a pastry. Do you ask a chocolate-covered cream puff for emotion? I just watched the prettiest tourists and pounced on the one who seemed the most accommodating. They were all looking for a carnal change of scene, the lyricism peddled by Doisneau with his postcards, the lethal myth that Paris is the perfect place to fall in love. A little like Venice and its Bridge of Sighs, where the fools would kiss, blissfully unaware that the passage was once used to take prisoners to the cells known as “the Leads”, hence the sighs. The same is true of Paris. A field of ruins where women and children were massacred in 1871; the Seine, a common grave into which they tossed Algerians in 1961; the Hôtel Lutétia, first headquarters of the Gestapo and then a destination for concentration-camp survivors. Paris, the city of lovers.

  Anyway, I liked to spend my nights in Montmartre, walking along Rue Poulbot, following the decrepit ramparts of Montmartre to a wintry Place du Tertre in the rain, far from the city’s din, lonely as the Devil in my long black coat. I became one with the walls, the cobblestones, the air. I was a damned soul. One evening, when there was a crescent moon, a woman in a hoodie who looked like Vitalia walked towards me. The look she gave me made me lower my eyes in shame. As dark as the lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets, she was waiting alone in front of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, cowled like a nun. She lowered her hood and entered the church, which is dwarfed by the hideous Sacré-Coeur. Any right-thinking Montmartrian would have reduced it to rubble if they could.

  I followed her, my heart beating erratically. I was convinced I was going to die. I walked into the stone conch, which was
filled with an atmosphere of great peace. She was walking in front of me like Beatrice. I longed with all my soul to be a poet too, so that I could recognize real love, my one true love. Vitalia made the sign of the cross before the altar, and stopped in front of the stele to Adele of Savoy: this Queen of France had founded the abbey and used to come here to pray for a kingdom which wasn’t yet hitting the headlines, but probably had a clearer idea of its own identity.

  It was Vitalia, just taller and even darker. She was now holding a candle which she lit. The candlelight spread beneath the vaults, then faded. Only her face burned like the Tree, the holy Olive Tree of the East and the West. Then the flame went out and I lost her in the dark.

  XIV

  IN THE RUE DU MONT-CENIS, I was approached by a very dark-skinned girl, who wanted to draw my portrait. A student at the École des Beaux-Arts, she was sketching tourists to bring in a little extra cash. I struck a pose and the beautiful young woman drew my picture, enraptured by my sailor’s profile. After I’d paid her, she sat down at my table and ordered a mint cordial. Her name was Thamara, and she had black eyes, wavy hair, and a slender build. When I related my sordid exploits, she laughed a lot. I didn’t leave out a single thing that had happened to me since I’d come into the world. In her mind’s eye, I acquired a fantastical dimension and became a kind of mythical creature, a fictional fantasy character, a harlequin from the commedia dell’arte.

  Thamara laughed again when I told her about my enslavement on the beaches of Cetraro, my stay at the Villa Medici with its gallery of eccentrics, those gingerbread artists who filled the avenues of the now spiritless stately home, where what wit remained was that malicious, facetious brand of humour which at times gave rise to mockery. Thamara’s expression darkened. She believed that this was the kind of petty ridicule that sometimes paved the way for the Master of Curses whom the Gnostics called the Demiurge and who had created the Cave where men were born, quarrelled with each other, then tortured each other to death. In the Cave slept the Seven of Ephesus, the righters of wrongs whose awakening would herald the end of time.

  Thamara knew the Bible and the Gnostic writings by heart. She interpreted the history of the world and the great natural disasters in terms of the power of the Demiurge or of his opposite, the childlike spirit that sometimes took human form in people like me, who lived superficial lives with no ties, artists whose inability to be serious provided some protection against the world’s madness. At other times, it was the Demiurge who took possession of men, filling them with anger; they would then set about each other and become like rabid dogs.

  I didn’t understand everything Thamara told me. She was a woman of her times, in love with manufactured ideas, strange beliefs combining energy and flow, a superstitious mishmash, but I knew that the young woman thought that I, Sinbad, was a figure of the utmost importance, a trump card, a positive value in an absurd world. I didn’t believe it, of course, but I loved Thamara, another wonder encountered along my road of exile, whether it led to Damascus, Bosra, Constantinople or Jerusalem.

  I addressed my Letter to the Ephesians to Thamara’s body, since that princess from one of the books of the Bible was as beautiful as Solomon’s mistress, the queen of Sheba, whose legs were slender black columns and whose eyes were veiled doves. Her hair was a flock of goats on the mountainside and her teeth were shining fragments of ivory. Thamara, my sister, my spouse, delighted my heart. Milk and honey flowed in abundance under her tongue, as though in some paradise beyond my wildest dreams. She was like an enclosed garden, my sister, my spouse, a garden from Lebanon where all manner of fragrances rose into the air. And I entered this cloister and plucked the fruit of the pomegranate tree. Through the middle flowed a sealed fountain whose waters formed paths where I lost myself between palm trees, privet hedge, myrrh and incense, and the blood-red flowerbeds where saffron, nard and Cinnamomum grew and where I meditated in silence, a lover of virgins and perfumes.

  Thamara was as slim-waisted as a palm tree and her breasts were bunches of grapes that I pressed between my lips. Madly in love, we went travelling.

  We visited Damascus, in Syria, where the area around Bab Touma, the Gate of St Thomas, takes on a festive mood at night, and the girls and boys walk, arms entwined, their hair blowing in the wind, as they do in Paris. I was fascinated by the dusky, slender women, their dark eyes outlined in kohl, who brushed by us in the narrow streets of the Medina.

  We slept in a house which had a murmuring fountain in a patio straight out of the Arabian Nights. The house, with its Damascene two-tone masonry, had been run first by an English woman, who eventually sold it to a young Christian man. In the evening, we would go up onto the terrace and gaze at the Minaret of the Bride on the far horizon under the stars: I was the Hebrews and she was Pharaoh. Then we embraced, before falling asleep to the singing of the muezzins, whose melodies mingled in the night, like a strange alcohol, with the perfume of a bougainvillea.

  The following day, we visited the Great Mosque of Damascus, whose minaret we had seen from afar. The outer wall was surrounded by stalls selling recently made marquetry and Qur’ans printed in Iran. Droves of women shrouded in black veils and crying out in Persian flocked into the mosque and gathered in the chamber where the head of Imam Hussein lay behind a silver grille, wrapped in strange fabrics. I too walked over to the tomb in fascination and gazed at the precious head of the Prophet’s grandson, wondering if it was genuine, then walked away overcome by a premonition of misfortune, an irrational fear of death brought on by that vile relic.

  As for Thamara, she wept at the thought of the face battered by Caliph Yazid I who, as the story goes, hit the corpse’s lips, declaring: “We would have been content with the submission of the inhabitants of Iraq without this murder. But you, Hussein, broke the bonds of kinship and became a rebel!”

  A witness is said to have replied: “Get that stick away from the mouth that was kissed so often by the Prophet, his grandfather!”

  Yazid was allegedly irritated by these words, but spared Ali, Hussein’s son, and his family.

  I wondered if Hussein’s head had been preserved out of devotion for the holy man or to serve as an example to the rebels. Wasn’t the mosque actually built half a century after his death to expiate that founding murder? I was impressed by the constant stream of Iranian pilgrims who had come to kiss the mausoleum of the martyr of Karbala, weeping bitter tears as if they were mourning the death of a father or much-loved brother. These emotional outbursts left me cold. I couldn’t relate to such overblown displays of grief, which I had a feeling were put on. What was described as religious fervour was, in fact, an awful drama in which the actor was manipulated into playing his part so well that he was unable to get out of character after the performance. Did those men and women return to normal life after they left the mosque? Did they stop to look in a mirror and dry their tears, tidy their hair or reapply their makeup? When you see a man praying, how much of it is an act? Can we believe in faith if it calls attention to itself?

  Thamara had taken my hand. She was dressed from head to toe in a grey abaya without which she wouldn’t have been able to enter the mosque, the domain of ancient widows, mourning women and the Fates. And the actors, oh, the actors! Dance for us, you puppets, clowns and harlequins, dance! A sincere prayer needs no pretence, no bogus grief or public rapture. Pleasure is best taken in silence, by my faith as a sailor and a lover.

  We came out into the white-marble courtyard which reflected the sun, the cloudless sky and the green and gold mosaics depicting a paradise of palms and fruit, a promise of a magnificent afterlife, surrounded by a village or ancient city. The trees bore pearls, or they might have been fruit, grapes used to make wine for the best of men. These grapes have been mistaken for beautiful virgins: the Islamic afterlife holds out no promise of women, to my great despair, just a goblet of aged wine and divine intoxication on the banks of the Barada River, flowing through Sham from the Anti-Lebanon mountains. The martyrs themselves, who have
been changed into trees, are the ones bearing the heady nectar in the tranquil eternity of their plant-like existence.

  And so I lost myself in the Garden of Earthly Delights, accompanied by my sister-spouse, my army, Thamara, whose name is also a fruit that brings oblivion.

  Then we walked across the courtyard and ended up beneath the Bayt al-Mal, an octagon covered in mosaics the same colour as those of the mosque, standing on Corinthian columns like a tall wader over a pool of milk. It was once used as the treasury of the Faithful, storing donations used for worship, maintaining the mosque and preparing for the wars that plunged Damascus into turmoil for centuries and resulted in its ruin on many an occasion.

  The mosque was burnt down in the eleventh century, destroyed in the fifteenth by Tamerlane and then burnt down again under the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. All the floor mosaics were ruined and replaced by white marble in imitation of the marble facing on the walls of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, which we visited next and which we thought looked like an exact replica of the one in Damascus, although there were infinitesimal variations between the two, creating a divide. The former was Roman and Byzantine at heart, while the latter, due to a strange and obsessive perfectionism, had become Arab and as ochre as the sands of Palmyra. So there you could hope for a paradise filled with virgins instead of ancient bunches of grapes. Vines don’t grow in the desert, so the believer giving up his life for an idea needs some other kind of compensation. God is an abstract concept, become flesh, guiding the praying man through the icy solitude of the dunes. Mohammed’s religion is demanding, sober, cold. It doesn’t permit identification with its deity and it offers no comfort. It is conveyed by words, the text is chanted until it takes shape in the believer’s mind, like a vast stele on the path of desolation. That is the miracle of the Qur’an: starry words against the dark, empty dome of the sky.