Lunatics, Lovers and Poets

by Daniel Hahn

  Hosam’s portrait of my father did not correspond to the man I knew. Nevertheless, I did not question its authenticity. I continued looking up at the chandelier, from a different angle now. I took note of the conversation Hosam was trying to have with the German. It was not difficult to hear because, as I later learnt, whenever Hosam spoke English his voice went up several decibels. I listened to him attempt to convince Mr Huffmyer of his ‘experience’ and ‘astute abilities’, and felt tenderness for Hosam when I heard him say that he would be ‘a most honourable representative’ for the Munich air-conditioning company. The silver head of the German remained still.

  Although the lighting did not allow even the keenest of eyes to read, I opened my book. I had first read Don Quixote twelve years ago, when I was already a grown man. I came to it through a provocation I had read in one of the English literary journals. The reviewer – I have never been able to remember the Englishman’s name – claimed that ‘one ought only to read Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a child, well before the rivers of the mind have begun to set deeply into their banks. Reading it in maturity, when the currents of fantasy and reality are no longer able to mingle freely, would present a risk. What is lost in imaginative capacity in the reader would have to be compensated for with wilful, manual intent, which, given the wavering and equivocal methods that Cervantes employs, could unsettle the balance of a mature psyche. In fact,’ the author went on, raising the stakes even higher, ‘it is only when one has read the novel through the mental agility of early youth that one can hope to retain in manhood something of its childish wonder, for not having had the good fortune of reading it when young would invariably impoverish the imagination and leave it handicapped forever. Therefore, along with society’s ordering classifications, such as that of gender, another significant demarcation needs to be made between those who have and those who have not read Don Quixote at youth.’ And then, rubbing salt in the wound, the Englishman went on to tell us of his first reading, which took place when he was eight and when, according to his theory, the rivers of the mind are still shallow. His first encounter with the text was through Thomas Shelton’s translation, the first translation of the text into any language, completed in 1612, when Cervantes was still alive. ‘It was the rendition,’ the reviewer went on, ‘that Shakespeare would have read, if indeed he read Don Quixote at all. The record on this is inconclusive.’

  Like my detractor, the author of that pessimistic article, I too am unable to read Spanish. But I have, in the past twelve years, tried to make up for both lost time and my lack of Spanish by reading every translation I could find in the two languages I possess, Arabic and English. The copy I keep in the glove compartment is Shelton’s translation, partly because it was the first I had read and partly because I have never lost the thrill that Shakespeare’s eyes might have followed the same words, in the same order.

  The text did not enter the Arabic until more than a quarter-millennium after Cervantes’s death, incomplete and through a suspicious route. It was published in Algeria in 1898. It was made from the French and not the Spanish. The copy I have omits the names of both the Arabic translator and the French one he followed. The language is archaic, which, I have not altogether stopped suspecting, might have been due to the fact that it was written not by an Arab, but by Cervantes himself, during his long years of imprisonment in Algeria, perhaps to help pass the time and amuse himself, and then left behind and discovered some nearly three centuries later, by an opportunist who did not speak Spanish but who, on account of the French occupation of Algeria, had French and therefore could claim the text as his own translation of a translation. A double mirror. Who knows? Well, I suppose the text knows. Which is why, regardless of its dubiousness, I have been returning from time to time to that partial Arabic translation of 1898, my interest sustained by the possibility that it was made by Cervantes.

  I went to read by the light of the bar. The section I happened to open the book at was where Don Quixote, wearing his makeshift armour, approaches a castle and stops, expecting to hear the customary horn which heralds a knight’s approach. At that exact moment, a swineherd blew his horn to gather the pigs and Don Quixote, ‘with marvellous satisfaction of mind… approached to the inn and ladies.’ Every time I read this it made me laugh, and this time was no different. Hearing my own laughter, I blushed and decided to keep facing the page.

  The German must have been speaking because Hosam and Mustafa were silent. I looked their way. They were as still as statues. Then Huffmyer stood up, tried to read his watch, and looked about with irritated impatience.

  ‘But we have ordered all of this in your honour,’ Hosam told him, pointing to the table. ‘Then dinner tomorrow? But we insist… But this won’t do. You will call me? Promise? Then I will forgive you, but only this once,’ Hosam said and laughed too loudly. Hosam and Mustafa stood up and shook the man’s hand. Hosam bowed deeply again. ‘Goodbye, sir.’ When the German was already walking away, Hosam called after him, ‘And good night, Mr Huff… My regards to your excellent family.’

  I faced the book again until Hosam touched my shoulder.

  ‘Khaled Bey, honour us once again, please?’ Then to the waiter, ‘Omar, mint tea please.’

  In the light I saw Hosam was not as old as I assumed. Disappointment wrinkled his brow, and that twitch was playing havoc now with his left eye in particular. I closed the book and he said, with sincere concern, ‘Don’t lose your place.’ He had his hand tenderly cupping my elbow. ‘Did you bend the corner of the page? Dog ears; isn’t that what they call it in England? What a disappointment,’ he said softly as we crossed the room.

  ‘Welcome back, Khaled Bey,’ Mustafa said. Then to Hosam: ‘I told you; this Piano Bar place of yours is not the right location for a business meeting. He could hardly see the time. It’s a bar for lovers.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to know these things?’ Hosam snapped.

  ‘For a business meeting,’ Mustafa said, directing his words towards me, ‘you need a bright place where nothing is hidden. It gives people confidence.’

  Hosam lit a cigarette. ‘No, this has nothing to do with the venue; this has to do with cash. We obviously got to him too late. Someone had already whispered sweet promises in his ear. In Ali Pasha’s days we never had to plead like this. Someone like this piece of German shit would have been begging for our services. We would go in, buy double the quantity of units anyone could purchase, sell them, then return with an even larger order, but with one condition: give us sole agency, not only in Egypt, but in the entire Middle East. This is how you do business. Otherwise, it is impossible to penetrate.’

  ‘And what would you need to set up such a company?’ I asked.

  ‌

  ‌The Secret Life of Shakespeareans

  Soledad Puértolas

  translated by Rosalind Harvey

  I’m a man surrounded by Shakespeareans. My sister Julia, who is a couple of years older than me, studied English language and literature. She was in love with the language of Shakespeare and, not surprisingly, she then fell in love with Shakespeare, which, together with her obvious natural attributes, prompted the group of Shakespeareans – which wasn’t small – to fall en masse in love with her. As a result, a tightly bunched rosary of boyfriends passed through her hands, and an endless string of suitors filed through our house, some with more flair than others.

  I never got along with my sister’s boyfriends, not so much for being Shakespeareans, but because of their qualities as boyfriends. The least clumsy of them was far too shifty; the quiet one, whom you never knew how to speak to, was as irritating as the chatterbox, whom you could never get rid of.

  Once she finished university, Julia didn’t marry any of them. Her eyes had fallen upon an economist, a young man who read only in moderation. Essays, if anything. Never novels, let alone plays. But Shakespeare’s presence in our family life did not cease, due not just to Julia’s constant mentioning of him, marking out her conversation
with lines from his plays – particularly his lesser-known ones, just to intimidate us – but also to the simple tendency my sister had to turn her life into a stage play. She had of course been born with this trait, but no one doubted that Shakespeare had contributed enormously to its development.

  Julia and Marco got married, had two children, and seem like a well-matched couple. We all get on well with Marco. He’s a consultant for a large firm and his task, as far as I can tell, consists of improving product sales. Something to do with efficiency and the company’s image, I think. Anyway, the thing is, he travels a lot, he’s been to almost every country in the world.

  When we talk to Marco about news from wars that seem a long way off, he gives us new facts. He knows this city, that region, he tells us something about them, the food, the smells, anything. Not just wars and catastrophes: his comments might also allude to happy events. But we all know what the news is like – it doesn’t relay a huge amount of happiness.

  Sometimes, Julia and I both show up at our parents’ house for dinner. The time when it was just the two of us with them around the dining-room table, and our bedrooms, mine and Julia’s, were each on one side of the hall, is long gone, but we are the same: the same parents, the same son and daughter. Just like always, but after a period of time. The two of us speaking much more than they do, now. The two of them looking at us much more than they ever have done. With curiosity, with an awareness of a certain distance, conscious they will never fully know us. Accepting it, perhaps eagerly, as if shrugging off a weight.

  One of these nights, after eating, we settled down in the living room to slowly drink our coffee. Our parents had both put their heads back and closed their eyes. They dozed. On the TV, we’d just watched images of houses destroyed by bombs, columns of smoke, men crawling through the dust, among the wreckage, gunshots.

  ‘Aleppo,’ Julia murmured. ‘We were there five years ago. That was when I used to go with Marco on quite a few of his trips. I used to enjoy it. The firms Marco did business with sorted everything out for us. They put us up in five-star hotels and there was always a car with a driver for me to use, and a guide to show me around the monuments and other interesting places in the cities. I had lots of spare time but I never got bored. I liked the hotel restaurants. I liked watching the other travellers. A strange thing happened to me in Aleppo.’

  I made a mental note of everything Julia told me. Like the excellent amateur actress she is, she has a real knack for telling stories. She knows I like listening to her and that I often use the anecdotes she tells me in my novels, transformed, put into someone else’s mouth. Before she begins, she usually says to me: ‘This might interest you, you’ll figure out the best way to use it.’

  Later that evening, I wrote down what Julia had told me (and dramatised, too) at our parents’ house. I hardly changed a thing. I liked it just as it had happened. This is her story.

  The driver left me in front of one of the gates to the bazaar in Aleppo and, while I waited for him (I don’t know if he had gone to park the four-by-four somewhere else or whether he had to do something, get money from the bank or an ATM or buy tobacco, I can’t remember), I went into a shop whose little window display was full of fine scarves in all the colours of the rainbow. Up above, and to both sides of the door, hung more scarves like the others. Scarves of every size, made from silk, from very fine wool, from cotton. The breeze filled them up and blew them to and fro. It was impossible to resist the temptation to go into the shop. I rang the driver – he was guide and driver in one – and he agreed to come and meet me in the shop right away.

  I lost myself among all those scarves. When the guide turned up, the owner of the shop, a charming man with a white beard, a djellaba and a crimson-coloured fez, was still making up the parcels.

  Since we planned to take a good long look around the bazaar, the guide asked the shopkeeper to look after the bag with the scarves for me so I could walk round with my hands free, essential in a bazaar where there’s so much to see, to poke about in, to touch. He agreed happily, as far as we could tell from the great big smile he gave us. He stood in the doorway to the shop, looking around with satisfaction.

  When I emerged from the bazaar, one or two hours later – an indeterminate amount of time, as labyrinthine and repetitive as the hours spent on a stage – I felt so exhausted I almost forgot about the scarves being held for me in the shop. My guide didn’t, though. To him, my confusion made sense.

  ‘It’s true, bazaars make you dizzy,’ he said. ‘Your thoughts go all over the place, some go and others come in their place. It’s a healthy movement,’ he said. ‘It’s life.’

  I felt something very special, as if I were in a play, something I had sensed a few hours earlier, in the same shop at the entrance to the bazaar, as I got lost among the colours, sizes and textures of the scarves. Absorbed in a reality that made me desire everything and doubt everything at once, and which emptied me out of my previous life, of the connections in it, of the trip itself and my role in it. I existed there like I had never existed anywhere else. I was touching something unique, transcendent. Something that went beyond life.

  And so we went back to the shop with the scarves. The man with the crimson fez and the leathery skin handed us the bag and said goodbye again from the entrance to the shop, leaning against the doorway, encircled by a crown of scarves swollen in the wind like sails, happy and full.

  Back at the hotel, I left the packages in my room, freshened up a little and went down to eat in the restaurant. Then I fell asleep. Later that evening, I took the packages out of the bag and opened them. In one of the bundles, instead of one silk scarf, there were two. Exactly the same. Clinging to each other. Duplicated. A mistake. Or was it?

  That night, over dinner, I mentioned it to Marco. How could it be that an old Syrian shopkeeper whose premises backed on to one of the most ancient bazaars in the world had made a mistake?

  ‘It’s because he wants you to go back. It’s a sort of test,’ Marco said, jokingly, knowing full well that this was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  I decided that it wasn’t my place to teach anyone a lesson, still less an old shopkeeper from Aleppo. I would go back to the shop, buy another silk scarf, show him I knew when to keep my mouth shut, that I’d come back to set something right, if he wanted to do so, that is.

  I gave no explanation to the guide. All I said was that I wanted to return to the shop, which didn’t surprise him. He smiled, and nodded his head, as if saying to himself, ‘Yes, I knew it, I knew we’d go back.’

  Once again I was in the shop. A sunny morning. The wind was blowing; the scarves fluttered.

  The old man wasn’t surprised to see me. Once again he showed me some scarves, opening drawers, sliding display trays out, unfolding pieces of cloth.

  ‘This is the finest shawl of them all,’ he said, placing his wrinkled, bony hand on a piece of cashmere fabric in pinkish hues.

  Then, he moved his hand to his neck, just below his chin.

  ‘This is where the wool is at its finest. There’s nothing softer.’

  I asked him the price, which seemed to me exorbitant.

  ‘You won’t find a shawl like this anywhere else,’ he said, or at least I thought I understood.

  I bought it – how could I not? Why had I gone back to the shop, otherwise?

  It was the last purchase I made on that trip.

  Nevertheless, this incomparable shawl got ruined. Someone (maybe one of the maids who came to clean the house and who generally, more than any other job, used to like doing the laundry) put it in the washing machine. The shawl shrunk, the fabric grew tight and became matted, the edges curled slightly, the pink tones lost something of their delicate contrast.

  The best shawl that the old shopkeeper from Aleppo could offer me, bought on my second visit to his shop, after having found among my purchases one handkerchief too many.

  A question arose, of course: was the shawl that exceptional? It shouldn’t have been pu
t in the washing machine, naturally, but was it really extraordinary, unique? Was it worth the high price I had paid for it?

  It was a real anecdote, and I tried to respect it just as it was. I carried it inside me; I’d find out soon enough what I might do with it. It was too closely linked to my sister to attribute it, unaltered, to another character.

  One day, I run into Ignacio Gil, one of those Shakespearean boyfriends of Julia’s who had trooped unsuccessfully through our house. Of them all, he had perhaps been the best. Very modest, profoundly shy, somewhat evasive. He had become a renowned specialist on Shakespeare.

  We have a coffee in a nearby bar and, without letting me get a word in edgeways (not that I would have known what to say), he launches into a long and tedious speech on the question of Shakespeare’s identity. He does not put the man’s identity into question, what interests him is why so many doubts have arisen, why people have tried so hard to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare but someone else, a Bacon, an Earl of Oxford, a Lady So-and-So.

  Later on, after countless theories about one or another aspect of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, he asks me about my sister. Wanting to make the most of it being my turn, and because I enjoyed the anecdote and felt like telling it, I slowly string out the story of Julia and the scarves of Aleppo, the cashmere shawl, the shopkeeper with his crimson-coloured fez.

  Ignacio Gil listens very closely, fervently, I would say, as if he doesn’t want to miss a single detail, which makes me drag my tale out, making it longer, although I do try to stick to the story. When I finish, Ignacio Gil looks at me with a strange expression, as if he’d had a vision, a vision of the very same bazaar in Aleppo or the shop with the silk scarves. Then he asks me for my phone number, which he stores in his mobile phone. He gives me his and watches, silently, as I type it in.

  It’s very hot out in the street and we move away from each other with scarcely another word. I can’t stop wondering why he suddenly went so quiet, why he made not a single comment about Julia’s anecdote.