by Fouad Laroui
“Anyway, the affair reaches the head of the establishment. It’s true that Talal had not finished the race…”
“He finished it on the sand,” Nagib intervenes.
“But he had begun it on the sand,” Ali retorts. “At what point do these millions of grains cease to be sand and become a part of the fiction?”
Hamid shrugs his shoulders and continues his story.
“The leader of the establishment thinks of the clerk’s business card. He knows he’s in a minefield. Talal did not finish the race but there is perhaps a way to come to an agreement. He decides then to give a grade to the toothed whale in proportion to his breaching…”
“Breaching?”
“It’s the technical term. The breaching becomes thus a relative failure. Since Talal traveled two thirds of the pool, or rather the dry dock, he would have the same grade as one of his classmates who was at his distance at the time of his wreck (if I dare say it)—a grade lowered, however, by a third to take into account the fact that he did not faint in the middle of his efforts. I said we were an inventive people. And that’s how the whole affair came to end.”
Hamid had said it. He had even proved his starting assertion. At Café de l’Univers, all six of us remained for a long moment in silence, in that lovely unending afternoon. I don’t know what my friends or the cat were thinking about. I was seized by a strong emotion—tears came to my eyes, my heart tightened. It was gone forever, that blessed age, where we faced, imperturbable, the most absurd problems fate thrust upon us. I closed my eyes…I saw once more those faces of El Jadida: the governor, enigmatic; the super, attendant; Madame Corcos, who led the majorettes on the boulevard once a year; Charef the sworn interpreter, who was originally from Algeria (we forgave him); the doctor Argyatos; the owner of the Bata boutique; the local correspondent for Le Matin. We were a city proud of its Portuguese past and its hybrid present. We were unsure of nothing, capable of anything—even of inventing dry swimming. But where are the sands of days gone by?
FIFTEEN MINUTES AS PHILOSOPHERS
The classroom door opens. Amir and Sylvie enter, a bit intimidated. They take a few steps, look at the walls, the board, the tables…
AMIR (murmurs)
Well, here I am… here we are back in our old classroom…Here where you taught your philosophy class…
SYLVIE (she interrupts him)
Was it really this room? Are you sure?
AMIR (looks around then shrugs his shoulders)
This one or another one…They all look the same, after all.
SYLVIE (she paces back and forth while Amir takes a seat and looks at her)
No, not really. Personally, I liked the rooms where they taught geography. The colored maps on the wall, the globe on the desk… what a dream. Although…Today’s maps don’t have any more white zones, unexplored territories or places where no one has ever set foot. In antiquity, the maps of Africa had only one indication: hic sunt leones. (She laughs.) “Here, there are lions!” But there are no more lions in Morocco, unfortunately. The last was captured in 1912… (She turns back toward Amir.) Why are you smiling?
AMIR (still smiling)
Because here you are once again starting on a long monologue… Digressions…Like before. Incidentally, we used to call you “the overflowing river” more often than “Madame Rivière, the philosophy professor.”
SYLVIE
“Mademoiselle,” please. I wasn’t married.
AMIR
Yes, but we called you Madame Rivière. (He makes an offhand gesture with his hand.) Madame, mademoiselle…We didn’t make the distinction.
SYLVIE (daydreaming)
Believe me, there is one. (She laughs nervously.) I felt it happen… Ahem! (She pulls herself together.) I say, “the overflowing river,” that wasn’t very nice. I had just arrived from France, I was barely twenty-five years old, I wanted to teach you everything. You seemed like fledglings eagerly awaiting their beak…Well, not everyone… There were of course the loafs in the back…who seemed less interested in Kant or Bergson than in… (she crosses her arms across her chest.) in, what’s the word? My tits? (She shakes her head.) The loafs…I wonder what’s become of them. Sociologists, probably. (She laughs.) But the others, I wanted to teach them everything. Thus my mo-no-logues, my di-gres-sions, as you say. And philosophy…well, philosophy, it encompasses everything, everything is a part of it! (Finger raised, sententiously) Even mathematics is just a branch of philosophy!
AMIR (mockingly)
Mathematics? You know how to solve a differential equation?
SYLVIE
A what?
AMIR
A diff-fer-en-tial e-qua-tion.
SYLVIE
Ha, ha, very funny. Unfortunately, the branches of knowledge split very early on and we can’t learn everything. I studied philosophy in the strictest sense of the term.
AMIR (coldly)
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
SYLVIE (approaching Amir)
So it’s in a classroom like this one that it happened…What you call your “score to settle.” Is that it, the expression you used yesterday?
AMIR
Yes. How to explain? I don’t know where to begin. The problem…
SYLVIE (interrupting him)
Why do you call it a “problem”?
AMIR
It doesn’t matter what we call it! “Problem,” “question,” “concern,” as we’ve been saying for the past few years. (Snickering) “Souci!” It’s the name of a flower…there’s nothing more insipid than that! As if we’re afraid of words. Who decided the word “problem” was too scary and we shouldn’t use it anymore? Probably some marketing hotshot…
SYLVIE
Probably one of the dunces from the old days…
TOGETHER:
…now a sociologist! (She laughs. He snickers.)
AMIR
Anyway, the problem…Well, you’re the one who posed it.
SYLVIE
Me?
AMIR
Yes. Starting with your first philosophy class. That famous Pascal text…I still remember. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason…The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
Sylvie
Yes, it’s the most famous passage of Pensées. Beautiful, isn’t it?
Amir (starts)
Beautiful? Beautiful?? Sure, but I was sixteen years old! It was the first time that…that I studied philosophy, that I came into contact with “thought.” (He pronounces the word in a grandiloquent tone.) For me, what you said, it wasn’t beautiful, it was the truth…A whole new continent opened up, as if…as if my eyes were opened up, too…
SYLVIE
You’re exaggerating!
AMIR (more and more vehement)
Not at all! It was your job, to teach philosophy. You came to deliver your class and you left. But for me, it was…it was something else. Thought…Doubt! The anxiety that set in! “The short duration of my life in the infinite immensity of spaces…” I barely had the time to digest that and—wham!—Nietzsche was thrust upon me!
SYLVIE (mocking)
Alright then! Nietzsche was thrust upon you! Did it hurt?
AMIR (shrugs his shoulders)
Go ahead, make fun of me…
SYLVIE (conciliatory)
I’m sorry…But which Nietzsche text are you talking about? I don’t remember talking about Nietzsche.
AMIR
You did! That business of eternal recurrence!
SYLVIE
Oh right!
AMIR (agitated)
It went something like: “One day, or one night, a demon will wake you and say to you: this life, as you now live it and have lived it, we
ll, you will have to live it once more, in all its details, even the most minuscule; every joy, every sorrow…every thought and every sigh…in the same succession, from beginning to end. The same inescapable sequence! And then you will have to start over, again and again…Indefinitely!” Such anxiety! That day, I couldn’t eat anything. I didn’t sleep at all that night!
SYLVIE (astonished)
I say! If I had known…You were a very sensitive adolescent, very suggestible.
AMIR
And then that phrase by Pascal (him again!) that you repeated so often: “The last act is bloody…”
SYLVIE (completes the phrase)
“…however pleasant the rest of the play is. A little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.”
AMIR
“A little earth is thrown at last upon our head…” That depressed me for life…
SYLVIE
You’re exaggerating!
AMIR (stares at her intensely then shrugs his shoulders)
It was like a veil, a gray cover that fell over me, that fell over the world. That gray cover went with me everywhere. When I went to France to do my studies, it was there. When I returned, it was waiting for me, even under the sun.
As if I had drunk a poison…
SYLVIE
A poison?
AMIR
Yes. The poison of philosophy…
SYLVIE (interrupting him)
Stop right there! You’re talking like they do in the countries where philosophy is banned…Because it makes you reflect and reflection is dangerous. Dangerous for the power…It’s better that people don’t reflect, that they remain naive, attached to dogmas that call for obedience above all. That the slave obeys without asking questions, that’s the master’s dream. But philosophy comes to throw a wrench in the gears…
AMIR (interrupting her in turn)
But it’s not about that! You were talking about death all the time. That was the ultimate truth. “Life is nothing but a dream,” you said…
SYLVIE (she interrupts him again)
That’s Calderón de la Barca: “What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction…All of life is nothing but a dream, and dreams are nothing but dreams.”
AMIR
I thought: “Might as well die then.” But if everything was just going to start over, eternally, thanks Nietzsche, what a nightmare! I was stuck. And Pascal, with his “last bloody act”…I had some difficult months because of you.
SYLVIE (taken aback)
Because of me?
AMIR
Yes!
SYLVIE
And that’s why you insisted on coming back here yesterday when you recognized me in that little café on the coast? That’s why you asked me to meet you here at the high school? (A pause.) This score to settle, it was…it is with me, then?
AMIR
Yes.
SYLVIE (laughs nervously)
If we were in an Agatha Christie book…Should I be worried? (She looks toward the door.) Is a constable or a moghazni coming to arrest me? For causing you distress when you were fifteen years old?
AMIR
No, no…That said, there’s some truth to what you said. (He stares at her.)
SYLVIE (uneasy)
Alright, let’s go, you’ve had your fun, let’s go now.
AMIR
No!
(He leaps toward the door, blocks it with a chair and stands before it, arms crossed.)
SYLVIE
I don’t find this funny. (She walks toward the door.) Let me through!
AMIR
No!
(They stare each other down.)
SYLVIE (right up against him)
Let me through!
AMIR
Not a chance!
(He rummages in his jacket pocket and takes out a black revolver that he holds against Sylvie’s head.)
SYLVIE (she jumps back and screams)
You’re crazy!
AMIR
Yeah, I’m crazy! Crazy, fou, loco, h’meq…But whose fault is that? I was at peace, I asked nothing of anybody…and then philosophy…that obsession with absurdity…with death, that obsession you stuck me with! (He threatens her with the revolver.) Sit down!
(Sylvie goes to sit down on a bench.)
AMIR
No! Over there! (He points to the teacher’s desk. She sits down.) And now, to work! You’re going to bring me back to how I was before I met you…Carefree! Simple. “Stupid,” if you will. Like all the people who don’t worry themselves about philosophy, who peacefully believe in God or in Providence, who aren’t obsessed with death, nor by what comes after! (She remains silent.) Go on! Speak! Now we’re going to finish the class. We’re going to unravel it all. Make me stupid again! I want to be stupid!
SYLVIE (sarcastic)
You’re already crazy, that’s a start.
AMIR
Ha ha, very funny. But what is madness, anyway? Here we have a subject for philosophy. Come on, let’s begin. (He threatens her with the revolver.) Go on! Make me stupid again! Rid me of this obsession with death. (He shouts.) Go on!
SYLVIE (frightened)
Alright. (Hesitant) But you’re wrong about everything. Certainly, “Philosophy is learning how to die…”
AMIR (interrupts her, irritated)
No, that I already know. I don’t want to learn how to die, I want to become a child again. Or an idiot. Or both. I want to go back to the time before philosophy. My parents, my family, everyone in this country—they do a few prayers every day, they fast when necessary, give a small coin to a passing beggar—and as a result, they’re serene and at peace. They’ll go to Paradise, they’re sure of it. As for me, I am in Hell. Every day! Because of philosophy.
SYLVIE (furious)
But that’s idiotic! It’s exactly the opposite. Philosophy teaches you how to live by teaching you how to die: the two go together. “We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant.” It’s clear, isn’t it? (Amir shakes his head.) “We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant.” It’s Saint-John Perse…
AMIR
Continue.
SYLVIE
Epicurus said it well. Something like: “I cannot fear death for as long as I am here, it is not here. And when it will be here, I will no longer be here. Thus, I will never meet death. Thus, I do not need to be afraid of it…”
AMIR
Continue.
SYLVIE
But what more is there to say, after that? Must I keep quoting? “Don’t aspire, oh my soul, to immortal life. But exhaust the field of the possible.” Pindar said that in 5 B.C. Or else Valéry: “The day is rising, we must try to live!” Or else must I explain yet again the myth of Sisyphus? We must have gone over it in class, no? In any case you know the last words of Camus’s essay: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
AMIR (vehemently)
Yes, but all that, that comes after! After the doubt instilled by philosophy, after the anxiety of death. After the absurd has taken hold in the heart…in the heart of my life, of my existence. I want to return to the innocence of before…before your philosophy class!
SYLVIE
Well, if that’s what you want, it’s not worth it. There’s no going back. One cannot unlearn. It’s impossible.
AMIR
We can’t go back?
SYLVIE
No.
AMIR (slowly, dully)
But I could go past anxiety…I could commit myself to a cause bigger than life, bigger than death…Go blow myself up in Iraq or in Afghanistan!
SYLVIE (sarcastic)
That’s really smart. Give your life out of fear of death! Have you heard about Gribouille? Who takes refuge in a pond to escape the rain?
AMIR (bursts)
But then what’s left, faced with the anxiety of death?
SYLVIE (gets up, ardent, makes passionate gestures wit
h outstretched arms)
But I’ve just told you! “Proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant.” Seize the instant! Carpe diem! Try to live!
One must imagine Sisyphus happy!
AMIR (While she’s speaking, he slowly raises the gun and brings it to his temple. Sylvie does not notice.)
Perhaps…But we can also put an end to it right away. It’s not worth waiting for the boulder to crash back down. And too bad if it all starts over again.
SYLVIE (She turns toward him and rushes to stop him from pulling the trigger.)
No!
AMIR
So long, absurd world!
(He pulls the trigger. His face is inundated with water. He bursts into laughter and “shoots” at Sylvie. She too is inundated with water.)
SYLVIE (furious)
Imbecile! What is this…this…act?
AMIR (beaming)
Life is a dream, the pistol is a water gun. “The whole world are actors.” That’s Petronius…Sartre said the same thing with his business of d’en soi et de pour soi, being-in-itself and being-for-itself. You see, I continued with philosophy, even after.
SYLVIE (still furious)
I don’t understand. Why all this dramatization?
AMIR (very calm)
“Dramatization?” It’s precisely that, that’s exactly the word!
I dramatized the malaise, the anxiety, into which you plunged me, ten years ago. And now, we’re even. The score is settled. I’m dead and so are you. Now we can finally live.
SYLVIE (She unblocks the door and runs out yelling.)
Imbecile!
AMIR (sticks his head out of the small opening of the door)