by Ryad Girod
Gassouh! Gassouh! And you stop moving forward, you raise your head and you open your eyes. But what do you see, Mansour? From your vantage point, Mansour, gaze fixed straight ahead of you but also elsewhere … can you see them shouting or do you see something else? Is there even something else to see, other than all this hatred and all this morbid curiosity that solders the crowd together, cramming us one against the next? And is it even possible to see something else? Is it possible to see something other than the center of this esplanade? You look and you smile, Mansour! Do you see Nadine’s face or do you see that of someone else? What face do you see, Mansour? From atop that dune pummeled by the wind, you also saw something else … perhaps the billions of grains of sand, whipped up violently, formed something that only you could perceive … Some philosophers say that we need something greater than us to be able to go on living … Was that what you were searching for from the top of that dune, which had become your dwelling place? Something greater and more vast than all of that desert that went on and on forever all around us, greater and even more vast than all of that sky under which you patiently awaited the appearance of something that would fill you with joy and then send you back into the world with a smile on your lips. But some philosophers have a poet’s soul that could not conceive of you being able to walk forward, your gaze held aloft and a smile on your lips, toward the center of this esplanade, without it corresponding to something greater than a center … for this center to be nothing more than the random final point of a trajectory that is just as random, that of a life in which the events are neither more nor less organized than a fistful of stones thrown with your eyes closed and that, maybe, the unfolding of our lives is made up of nothing more than a series of coincidences much greater than our feeble wills. But your executioner has nothing of a poet or a philosopher about him, he brutally pushes you to keep you moving toward your final destination and the heavy chains that hamper your steps nearly send you falling … and, as your body stumbles forward, something seems to hold you by the shoulders … you lower your head and resume your march toward that unexpected center from where you will rise up from among us. Or maybe not. Who is to say?
Still burning from what Nadine had failed to see in me, by which I mean anything at all, I hadn’t looked on the whole situation favorably, a situation that had seemed to me no more and no less than a scam … that Stan had leapt at the opportunity to possess, for very little cost, a kind of general handyman, a deluxe slave, one who would serve him by maintaining his garden, of course, but also by cleaning the house, repairing odds and ends, doing the shopping, running administrative errands, and above all, by making him look important in front of his compatriots, who only possessed poor, needy help from the Philippines, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, when he introduced Mansour, his landscape architect … I would have preferred that Mansour return to Damascus to be among his own, his family. I tried hard, and on several occasions, to make him see reason … But what was left to him of reason at this point? I also asked our employer to assist me in this aim by returning his passport to him, but he refused, alluding to a “temporary burnout” and stating that things would eventually go back to normal. I then contacted his family, appealing to them for a repatriation for medical reasons, but it proved to be impossible, on their end, to obtain a visa and come to Saudi Arabia to get him out of there … I even tried to get assistance from our embassy, but they were all, and quite justly, occupied with other matters that were much more serious than the repatriation of a fellow citizen who had been suddenly transformed into an ass. As I was leaving the Syrian Embassy, I looked over at the Embassy of France, which adjoined it, wondering if perhaps they could come to our aid in the name of human rights and our love of the French language and yet, very quickly, the memory of my last soirée dispelled any hope. Distress leading to even crazier ideas, as it often does, I had even considered slipping us in, Mansour and me, via the underground passage that connected the gardens of the French Embassy to the courtyard of the residence of the Ambassador of Algeria … the dickhead from Cultural Services had told me in confidence, shortly before the drunken disaster that had ruined our friendship, that a secret tunnel had been constructed in case of emergency so as to permit the Algerian Ambassador and the members of his family to take flight “via” France … and so I imagined us, dust-covered in the middle of the salon belonging to His Excellency the Algerian Ambassador, requesting asylum and protection for the great-great-grandson of their nation’s founder … but that scenario, for some strange reason, seemed pretty dicey, and this is how Mansour soon found himself a prisoner of Stan and Nadine, of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and of himself.
That is everything I had come to believe, at least initially. That my friend, convinced that he was a donkey, had become the slave of a pretentious and Machiavellian couple … but, as time passed, a new image of Stan and Nadine materialized, and of the whole situation, in a manner that was unexpected and quite surprising, to say the least. I was still welcome to visit Mansour, to speak to him, to take him out, to go for a spin in his beautiful red Camaro or drive him out into the desert. Stan seemed to often be absent, leaving very early and coming home very late, he ran into Mansour fairly infrequently and Nadine fairly infrequently as well, it seemed to me. On the rare occasions that I saw him, he was wandering between his office and the kitchen, as if the captive of some enchantment, blurting out an asshole or a fuck along the way, quite innocently, then disappearing for good into a bedroom that I eventually figured out was his own … I also understood that Mansour spent the large part of his day, if not the entire day, in a bedroom that belonged to Nadine. All hope crushed, sick from jealousy, I still sought, with a heavy heart, to find out what they were doing in that bedroom. Reading and talking, replied Mansour, plainly and without irony … even as if, and again, this was over the course of many days, this was some sort of self-evident fact … as if there was nothing else that could take place in that bedroom, beyond reading and talking. But I didn’t believe a word of it … without thinking that Mansour had lied to me, I had begun to believe he no longer had sound enough judgment to know that fucking was not a part of the elementary rules of cordiality. As the days went by, both of them maintained this strange rapport, this practically adulterous daily life … He, the patient, and her, the healer who dispensed the treatments that were best suited to his enfeebled state within an atmosphere of sensuality that wasn’t the least bit appropriate … as if he was the sick son and she the attentive mother. I pictured her, stretched out on her bed, naked or practically naked, as Mansour had confided to me, and him sitting directly on the floor to listen to her talk and read aloud from all kinds of books … A lot of poetry, and it’s doing me a world of good, the poetry! She can do that while she reads poetry? I secretly asked myself as I made my way into the conjugal bedroom to fetch him and take him for a spin in the desert, seeing her effectively half-naked, stretched out on her stomach, her index finger tracing the lines of an open book, a see-through shawl carelessly covering her back and her ass, and indeed, reciting aloud the verses of Hafiz or Khayyám to the donkey that Mansour had become, at the foot of her bed like one would have a pet, or a slave, or a kind of eunuch from whom someone had distractedly neglected to snip off the threatening bits … and I couldn’t bring myself to picture anything else, as I accompanied him to the top of his dune, than what imposed itself on me with force and violence … and while Mansour saw whatever it was he was able to see out there beyond the dunes, I struggled with the onslaught of stills from the film that was being played out before my eyes, as if they had been there, right in front of me … both of them naked in that bed, in that bedroom in which clouds of incense and oud continually floated among the stacks of books scattered here and there and her, kneeling, in the middle of the bed … her head thrown back and her mouth open and her neck extended, from which, at the end of a silver chain, was suspended a cross, hanging over an open book out of which she declaimed, aloud and intended for the ass that was bu
ttressed behind her, the poetry of Khayyám or Adonis or Hafiz or whomever else it might be … until it turned to cries! While the ass sunk himself in deeply, slow and deep, she asked while she still could of the animal that had climbed up behind her as if it was feeding time and the fodder had to be quickly swallowed down, an eye wide open and trained on the bedroom door and fearing, like a frightened animal, that his food would be unjustly taken away or that his head would be cut off … while she stretched out while she splayed out while she spread as wide as possible so he could enter even farther, even deeper, she asked him again, head thrown back, eyes already closed, mouth open wide and neck extended with its silver chain from the end of which a cross stirred and swung and waved … while the animal grabbed hold of her body with its entire body and glued its skin against hers while it nuzzled its muzzle in a manner of speaking into her scented curls and keeping a fearful eye on the door and abruptly holding his hand across Nadine’s mouth so as to disappear, the two of them, through moans and stifled cries …
While Stan was fermenting his wine in his bathroom, in the company of his memories or what remained of them thanks to his regular consumption of that shit, which he drank without allowing it enough time to settle or mature as it passed through the alembics he had fashioned and that could have been made by any ten-year-old kid … sometimes even consuming it directly from the bathtub, a red, nearly black liquid that reeked of alcohol and that went directly, without even stopping by his stomach, to muddle his brain and erase any memory that might explain his presence in Saudi Arabia, his marriage to Nadine, his having gone to live among the Arabs … not even remembering anymore that he had once, at a certain time in his life, wanted to discover something more than his miserable suburb, that he had at one time hoped to discover the magic of the Orient and that he had thought he had found that magic, and rightly so, concentrated within the person of Nadine … but also found the loss of nearly all of his reason, which left him at the edge of the bathtub, cursing away at all the assholes who crossed his life’s path and most definitely not getting anything about anything … having become, thanks to drinking that homemade shit, worse off than Mansour, Stan could no longer understand anything whatsoever about the trajectory that his life had been following, a shitty one, really, and of which the outcome was in little doubt to any conscious onlooker. Death in the land of the Arabs, one way or another … Dead drunk at the edge of the bathtub while Nadine and Mansour, upstairs, gradually returning to reality, short of breath and their sight still blurred from the flashes of pleasure that took their time fading but returning all the same to that sad, tragic reality, of which I couldn’t quite yet see all of the angles, and with regard to which I still harbored a certain sense of suspicion, a certain skepticism, when Mansour, atop his dune, told me that Nadine knew how to empty him of everything that weighed upon him, that she could return to him his empty gaze, face leaned over the void, open hands draped across her legs … whereas I thought that this was nothing but a vulgar attempt to cover their tracks, to divert me from that which had taken hold inside of me as far as certainty and anguish … even as Mansour continued to feed me his nonsense … his head rested on Nadine’s thighs so as to find peace, like a hundred and fifty years earlier, when Léon Roches rested his own torment-filled head upon Abdelkader’s legs so that he would heal him of his pain and so he could drift off to sleep with his heart at peace only to wake up in the middle of the night and discover Abdelkader in a state of rapture … Léon Roches, that complicated figure of the nineteenth century, at once Abdelkader’s translator and his secretary, confidant and spy, perhaps friend and perhaps traitor, who felt it crucial to bear witness: I succeeded with great difficulty in extricating myself from that mound of mud, stones, and corpses, and I arrived in Abdelkader’s tent in a deplorable state. My burnoose and my haik were soiled. In a word, I explained what had just happened to me. Abdelkader had me supplied with other clothing and I went to sit next to him. I was under the influence of a nervous excitation that I could not master. Heal me, I said to him, heal me or I would rather die, for in this state I feel I am incapable of serving you. He calmed me, had me drink an infusion of schiehh and placed my head, which I could no longer support, on one of his knees. He was crouching in the Arab fashion; I was stretched out beside him. He placed his hands on my head, which he had removed from the haik and the chechias, and under his gentle touch it was not long before I was asleep. I awoke well on into the night; I opened my eyes and I felt comforted. The smoky wick of an Arab lamp barely illuminated the emir’s great tent. He was upright on his feet, three steps away from me; he thought me asleep. Both his arms, raised up to the height of his head, lifting from both sides his burnoose and his haik, which were of a milky whiteness, and fell in splendid folds. His beautiful blue eyes, lined with black lashes, were raised up, and his lips, slightly parted, seemed to still be reciting a prayer even though they were unmoving. He had reached a state of ecstasy. His aspirations toward the heavens were such that he no longer seemed to touch the ground.
6.
IN COMMEMORATION of the fortieth anniversary of the death of the Saudi king Faisal, the newspaper Al Jazeera had thought it markedly symbolic to run a headline about the speech the king had given to the United Nations, along with his portrait, and the obvious caption “A King’s Speech!” I scanned through the main points of the editorial while enjoying my coffee on the terrace of the Starbucks at the Royal Mall, where I had actually found the paper and in which I was reading the traditional intimations of the grandeur of the House of Saud and the traditional incitations to a surge of pride among the Arab people and the entire Muslim community. As for me, I was markedly struck by Faisal’s gaze and by its resemblance to that of Mansour and that of Abdelkader. All three shared a very slightly cross-eyed look that conferred upon them something haughty, sublime, gentle, and disconcerting all at once. A look that projected me back in time to my childhood in Damascus, in the 1980s, in the days when we were taught love and pride for the nation, and sometimes for Arab civilization, and where the phrase “remember the tears of King Faisal” had in some way become a popular expression, almost a proverb destined for anyone who was feeling sorry for their lot in life … and as for the phrase “even kings shed tears,” this, in turn, was made use of when consoling young boys who were ashamed not to have quite grown up yet. “Remember the tears of King Faisal” had become, in the Syria of my youth, an admonition intended to make men of us. At the office, I couldn’t resist the impulse to search the web for King Faisal’s famous speech, during which his voice had cracked into a thousand pieces before the cameras of the entire world. Several links proposed, under headings such as “The King’s Speech” or “The Speech of the Last King” or even “The Last King of the Arabs,” to stream the video, in black and white and in poor quality but in which it was possible to see King Faisal’s troubled face and hear his equally troubled voice: My brothers, what are we waiting for? For the world’s conscience to rise by itself? Where is this world’s conscience? The great mosque of Jerusalem is calling for you to rescue it and save it … To save it from its suffering and its humiliation! What are we waiting for? What is it that holds us back? Are we frightened of death?