by Ryad Girod
Gassouh! Gassouh!
8.
… HEAD THROWN BACK and eyes already closed, mouth open wide and neck extended, from which the silver cross hung and stirred and swung and waved to the thrusts of the animal he had become and that was trying to go even farther to push even deeper so as to enter into her as if it was a question of becoming her … the animal he had become grabbing hold with its entire body that of the one I desired with my entire soul and gluing its skin against hers and nuzzling its muzzle in a manner of speaking into her scented curls while keeping a fearful eye on the door and abruptly holding his hand or rather his paw across Nadine’s mouth so as to disappear, the two of them, through moans and stifled cries … all of which I could hear in the wind that blew across that dune and in Mansour’s voice which addressed, in short bursts, the cliffs of the Najd.
Gassouh! Gassouh! By the winds that blow once again and by the circles that are forming around you, by their rotation around the axis that will raise you up from among us, I swear to you, Mansour, that I knew nothing of the path to come! And I still don’t know … if it leads from the center to the circumference or, just the opposite, if it means escaping the circumference to be reduced to the center. I was jealous of you, Mansour, but who wouldn’t have been? It wasn’t about her eyes, her skin, or her smell … You two were the center and the circumference brought into unity … what man among all of these men wouldn’t have wanted to be the center and the circumference at the same time? You had known all too well the aimlessness of the single point and you know all of its misfortunes. Misfortune unto us, Mansour! Misfortune unto us! From atop your dune, Mansour, you continued to gather your words only to reveal them to me in unexpected ways, spontaneous, during what must have been your own sort of thinking … and your words, Mansour, as if reduced to their own essence, sounded astonishingly poetic. The few words that you uttered followed one behind the other as if to release something from within you … the image replaced the idea and the emotion became the message. Humanity’s first word was poetic, and the last word will probably be Gassouh. Misfortune unto us, O God! Misfortune unto us!
Mansour read aloud, speaking the secrets revealed by the curvatures of the sand while I remained glued to Nadine’s skin … imagining myself right next to it as Mansour’s words took flight on the desert wind. Before the red patches of the sand, the pain she caused in me came in fits and starts. In one given moment, the desert would steal me away from myself … and then in the next moment, I would feel her burning beneath my skin. Burning from all that I continued to envision, as if I had been present in that bedroom where they must have loved each other until they disappeared, one and the other, among the cries and eruptions of their bodies set free. And burning by the side of the one who had been the source of all my suffering and who continued to provide me with the hot embers upon which my desire was being consumed and upon which my heart dreaded, worse than all of the bestiality that was being revealed, that beaded in droplets off of the two lovers, worse than the howls that must have floated up from their bodies … worse than all of that, I feared to see Nadine lie down gently on top of Mansour, who at that moment must have felt the caress of her curls, felt the denseness of her hair flow across his cheek as all of Nadine’s warmth diffused from it … fearing to see Nadine’s lips slowly come to rest against Mansour’s ear to whisper into it something far more serious than the poetry of Hafiz or Rumi or Khayyám, fearing to hear tender words, words woven together like a chant, a canticle of canticles inviting Mansour, begging him to come drink from her mouth the finest of wines and become inebriated from all the love that united them … in that bedchamber where Mansour had been suddenly transfigured, passing suddenly from the animal into Solomon himself, in that chamber of love where the smoke of incense that enveloped the two lovers flowed across the floor, as if prostrating itself before them, and where the books themselves seemed to crawl and bow before what was going on above them … before the miracle … Nadine and Mansour loved one another to the point of disappearing one into the other, her into him and him into her, to become one single and same being. Venus climbed, alone, into a sky of bluish pink. Purplish-blue glimmers were streaming across the rocky ramparts of the Najd when Mansour turned to me. Where is all of it going? Brought back to reality by his voice, I looked at the river of sand that spread out around us and the raw beauty that it was setting free. I turned back toward Mansour and noticed to what point he had been affected. As if he was returning from violent battles, his swollen and drooping eyelids holding up as best they could his sad and exhausted eyes … Where had he been? Where was he returning from? I had left him for a few short instants to transport myself into that bedroom and suffer the pains of love, a few short instants had been long enough for him to transport himself far beyond that point and far beyond all of the dunes … isolating himself right beside me and, at the same time, withdrawing into himself and opening himself up to the winds of the desert, like in some kind of act of contemplation or even meditation or both at the same time. Mansour had initiated an ascension, from state to state, which he was climbing in steps, in stations, so that the shock was not too violent, so that his mind or whatever was left of it or whatever it had become could adapt to what he was able to discover and know and see and feel … and to return from that voyage with something that seemed to me, once I had seen the glow of his eyes, to be astonishment or stupefaction … Fixed in place like a rock atop that dune, his eyes wide open and directed toward the cliffs, nothing whatsoever seemed to be stirring within him, not his body and not even his mind … his illness, the degeneration of his thinking matter, having surely provoked a reduction in the speed of his cerebral activity that would likely continue until it reached a complete standstill. Accordingly, time no longer held sway, he was becoming entirely enclosed in a kind of timeless transcendence. Through this, perhaps, he gained access to truths that were non-contingent and unbound to his history and his being. No longer being any more than a rock atop a dune made of sand, he no longer seemed to be inside himself. Where had he been? Where is all of it going? Mansour’s voice reverberated dully, like an inaudible scream with no echo, aimed at the cliffs of the Najd.
Gassouh! Gassouh!
And then fearing even more than anything I had been able to imagine up to that point, more than the love that had been possible in spite of everything, seeing them once again from below the dune as if all three of us had been in that bedchamber that had suddenly become a sort of temple purified by oudwood incense where the large bed resembled a kind of sacrificial, or at least ritual, site and upon which they loved one another so tenderly that they had ended up disappearing … caressing one another with so much love so much kindness so much generosity so much gentleness and so much tenderness that they had ended up disappearing, one after the other, one with the other, one into the other, her into him and him into her … loving one another so strongly that they became one with the One. And me, from a corner of the bedroom, seeing them consume one another, right before my eyes, like two butterflies in the flames … from atop this dune, I feared that there had been between them something much stronger than love … dreading that, in Mansour’s mind, loving Nadine amounted to loving the Divine Creator, amounted to loving Creation in its entirety. Above the sands, his gaze directed toward the plateau that rose up before us, Mansour once more expressed something that must have been the representation, the result, or the condensed version of a state he had reached … All worship is but worship of the essence of the Creator. All love is but love of Him.
I knew nothing of the path, Mansour … and I swear to you, Mansour, that I would have done things in the opposite direction if the structure of time had allowed me. How is it possible for us to do the opposite of what we want to do? How was it possible for me to wind up there, how was it possible for me to send you to the center of this esplanade … to send you to prostrate yourself before this crowd of unbelievers, to bow your head, to stretch out your neck for the blade of the traitors! Even
though I am first among them, the first traitor, the one who would deserve the spit and the mud. Do you remember, Mansour, when we were in Damascus and you told me the story of your illustrious ancestor? When you described for me the eyes that the Duke of Aumale must have had when he was given Emir Abdelkader’s weapons and when he promised him exile to Saint Jean d’Acre or somewhere else in the East … Well, I most certainly must have had those same eyes when, from atop your dune, you shared with me the words that had come from Nadine’s lips … You said that the eyes of the French duke had looked condescendingly over all that made up the village of Ghazaouet and that they had abruptly widened when Abdelkader presented himself before him, like a pale star climbing the night sky. The duke’s bright eyes expressed all of his admiration and his fascination and then, when Abdelkader handed him his saber, reminding him of Lamoricière’s promise, darting and shifty, they no longer expressed anything but envy and shame … the shame of an entire nation. You said he was envious in the face of Abdelkader’s words and eyes, convinced that such a man would never go back on his oath, you said he was envious of the power of the promise and ashamed to know himself incapable of keeping his own. I have no kingdom, Mansour, but my eyes, from atop that dune, must have certainly expressed just as much envy and shame when they met your own … envious and jealous of all the love that had been given to you and ashamed to want to take it away from you … But I know that your eyes knew all of that when they met my own. You are the only one to have tasted of Nadine’s lips, you are the only one to have known the marvel of love, you are the only one to have known the raptures of faith … out of all of us, you are the one true believer. We are the traitors, who have renounced much more than our faith.
And then reappearing, the two of them, before my eyes and on the slope of sand that gave me the impression it wanted to swallow me up. I saw that bedchamber once more, where Nadine, sitting cross-legged on that large unmade bed, still trying to catch her breath and still sweating, held Mansour’s head … which he had, just then, completely exhausted, rested on one of her thighs as if he had set it there after it had been severed by the violence of ecstasy … she gathered him up in her hands like Leila might have done with the fallen of Love, or like Rabiʿah, the first female saint of Islam, who rested her body and head against the earth during prayer. From one of the corners of that chamber of love, I read in the curls of smoke given form by the incense all that was signified by the position of the two lovers … And I heard, with tears in my eyes, Nadine’s voice. From Your love, I am given life. From my love, you are given Yours.
Gassouh! Gassouh!
I fell from atop your dune and I tumbled down the never-ending slope. I fell suddenly as a result of moving in your direction or maybe from trying to get up from that uncomfortable, unbearable position, from that oh-so fragile balance upon the line that divided the two sides of your dune … worn out, crushed by everything that I had just seen or imagined, heard or fantasized, I had wanted to get up to leave or maybe I had wanted to charge at you … Whatever the case, I stumbled and fell from the top of your dune and rolled like a stone, no more and no less than a stone, which tumbled down that never-ending slope to end up like a man in the sea, and I sank into the sands of that long dried-up river, terrified and fearing that it might carry me off into the emptiness of the desert. In that mineral void where I felt as if I was drowning, I tried to save myself by attempting to climb back up, to travel in reverse up that bank from which I had plummeted like a falling stone. I was laboriously climbing the dune where you, Mansour, still rested, sitting lightly and, while I continued to toil away, to sink into the goldenness of the sand, to struggle for breath as I tried to attract your attention, you turned your gaze on me like you were holding out a hand, at once open and closed … And whatever the case, I remained full of fear and full of rage and full of images that overlaid themselves upon the distribution, the undulation, the sinuation of the sands and the rocks that sprawled the length of a red and ochre immensity alongside a sun descending and diffusing its gentle rays that spread wide and setting in long sweeps across the majestic cliffs of the Najd which also stretched out, rolled out reproduced in waves forming gigantic dizzying ridges escarpments that threaded and dashed their way across that vast expanse of sand beyond which towered yet more majestic cliffs from another plateau like two banks two shorelines of the great river that had noisily flowed centuries and centuries earlier and which had since become nothing more than a graceful and undulating succession of dunes, curved and dry and flowing toward the infinite that unfurled itself everywhere my eyes could turn … Your hand, right then, caught my own … and your eyes, Mansour, grabbed on to mine. A battle’s conclusion. Your eyes were nothing less than the manifestation, at least to my senses drowned in the waves and the eddies of sand, of a power that rises up past the heavens … Your eyes were at once the supreme image and the veil in front of the supreme image. In that waning daylight, I could see nothing but the light of your eyes. Your eyes of love. I surfaced from the waves and drew up alongside you … I put my footsteps in yours so as to once again find my way to the city where the two of us had washed up.
9.
BY THE SUN THAT SETS and by its descending rays. By the flash of the light before the morbid darkness. By the sun that rises and the truth it reveals. By the flash of light behind the perishing darkness. An idiotic smile … there, perhaps that is the only thing that history will remember of President François Hollande. Mansour and I have been too hard and too unfair as far as he is concerned, too mocking, even, when it surely must have been his readings of history and his left-wing revolutionary thinking that had shaped his convictions in such a way that he came to the aid of the people of Syria … not only the devotion to defending human rights but also some deeper conviction, more concrete, like an old debt that France needed to repay and that he, friendly François of the Français, had resolved to take on himself, personally … perhaps, even more than to eliminate the dishonor, it was to erase the breaking of a sworn oath, that of Lamoricière or that of the Duke of Aumale, it was for something more integral in the French identity that this friendly little fellow had substantially raised himself up to become the savior of the Syrian people … for a fitting bit of poetic justice. A return to grace. In the same way that Abdelkader had saved thousands of Christians from certain massacre, François felt duty-bound to save thousands of Syrians from massacres to come. Poetic justice toward history. That was definitely it. How had we been so stupid and so mocking when we knew perfectly well that in politics, decisions are made in accordance with three or four different priorities, in terms of convenient truth and not absolute … stupid and mocking even as we wandered through labyrinths of logic that pushed us to believe he only adopted that position to do business with the Saudis or to protect Israel or to ensure himself a second term in office, a lightning-quick war like in Mali that would guarantee him unquestionable popularity and a re-election that was just as unquestioned … stupidly mocking.
But you hadn’t yet become what you were destined to become. By the sun that was setting and by the cold that was returning, I was emerging from the waves of sand and I put my footsteps in yours so as to once again climb that dune where I had sought out the point from which it seemed to me that you could see the truth stripped bare … but had I truly found it, that point? Because around me, there was nothing but desert. Emptiness as far as the eye could see. And I told myself that perhaps this was what you had been seeking. Not the infinite beauty of that empty infinite, but the emptiness itself. And to take refuge within it. Mansour, you were falling from atop that dune into an unfathomable void without my even being able to notice it happening. And there you resided in the company of the truth stripped bare. And when you returned to me, in that waning daylight, I could see nothing but the light of your eyes … and in your eyes, Mansour, I could see nothing but your love. As I sank into the sands, you came down from atop your dune with the elegance of a tightrope walker and the grace of an angel. Y
ou hadn’t yet become what you were destined to become. How can one grasp the center and the circumference at the same time? How is it possible, in a single motion, to reduce oneself to be the center while expanding oneself to be the circumference? And that is definitely what you succeeded in doing atop your dune, curling yourself up so as to unfurl like a shockwave across the infinite expanse of sand … Gassouh! cry the fools instead of prostrating themselves around you and begging a few atoms of your knowledge. Even just a single atom of your knowledge.
Or perhaps François’ smile conveyed a profound lack of understanding of things and in particular of the world, which had to continue spinning too quickly, so to speak, and for which he had neither the strength nor the intelligence to slow it down, to attempt to understand it more subtly, more plainly, more justly … much like Mansour and I, François wouldn’t understand anything at all about anything at all and he was all too conscious of his own inability to have a vision, even if it was only a simple glimmer of a vision … knowing only that he had to get over it without thinking too much about his minister’s decisions or those of his advisers and that he had nothing more than that idiotic smile to offer to the world … nothing more than that idiotic smile, like an avowal of impotence, polite and full of excuses, in the face of the world and his advisers, young thirty-somethings or barely forty, in a hurry to move at the same rhythm as this new world and in a hurry to be done with the old political system that he incarnated in spite of the hair dyeing and the clever jokes that livened up his speeches and the occasional peals of laughter that he still managed to elicit … so that idiotic smile he offered up to young forty-somethings like Mansour and me, thinking that perhaps he was dealing with two advisers from Syria or Lebanon or Jordan when in fact we were, just like him, in the middle of sinking into total incomprehension with regard to anything that went on around us … just as lost as him, all we had left was mockery when it came to believing that we still understood something about this disturbing world in which we no longer had any role to play and in which we had become nothing more than extras, blended into the background of an artificially sparkling set … just like the Caliph al-Muqtadir, without power and without authority, we imagined François skulking around inside the walls of the Élysée without even being permitted to attend crucial meetings … Just as impotent as al-Muqtadir, in other times and other places, François would have recovered amid the sensuous tenderness of a harem.