by Bernard Uzan
Actually, the Arabs and their leader the Great Bey are pleased by the turn of events… And the Grand Rabbi of Tunis is in the same position as every grand rabbi in the world, he pleads, he supplicates, intrigues, buys, protects his own friends, sells off his enemies, in one word he tries to get out of the mess. During that moment of fear and disarray the Jews are wondering what is happening to them, after all they are Tunisians and don’t understand why they are being treated as Jews and as enemies, they don’t get it… A round up is organized, the Germans under the approving eyes of the Arabs, place the Jews in camps and asked the Italians and their allies after all, to stand guard. The irony was that the Italians in Tunisia were our cousins, our friends or our servants…Some of them took their revenge because of their status as servants, friends, or cousins. A few less cooperative Jews are deported, others are killed in the name of Teutonic civilization. Just when the Germans finally decided to act like Germans and get rid of that disgusting race of troublemakers, the Allies arrived, but things came very close, and we almost… But it was just a reprieve, we were now in a country that had opened its eyes and realized what it is or wishes to be, and is filled with hatred and rancor for those who betrayed, who became almost French and who had forgotten their origins. The danger is there, ready to explode in our face?
So wake up! Do something! …
Dad, do something! And Dad did something.
One morning he left to go to Paris with Fabien on a plane, with just a suitcase, like two thieves, like Polish Jews while I was somewhere else wandering around in the world, trying to become a man. It was an easy trip, everyone is very nice to the Jewish immigrants, they arrive in Paris, start another shitty kind of life and then Mom joins them, and a little bit later, almost immediately… Smack, the rabbit punch came suddenly….
And then Dad and then…
We should have remained in Tunis… No that would have been worse, we would have become the victims of our victims, so what?
What? ..... Who wants us?
The old beau interrupts my daydreaming with another stupid question:
“So what do you think about it? I’m asking you, you seem totally absent.”
“Not at all, I’m listening to you.”
“So what do you think about it?”
“I understand you perfectly.”
His burning eyes are shining and he smiles. Poor bastard! I can’t help thinking that he’s really pitiful.
“Thank you, thank you so much.”
“Don’t mention it!”
“You’re eating very quickly, you must be very hungry!”
He continues with his blathering in an attempt to impress me and I plunge back to my dreams.
His hand drifted on to my knee, just like that, absent-mindedly, without much fanfare, he keeps on eating with his hand on my knee… But what gives him the right to put his hand on my knee? Where does he get that prerogative? Soon will he want to feed me as well?
Will he lift a fork full of meat and ask me to open my mouth? Just like Pina did when she fed me?
Pina sits me down on the kitchen table, the red table in the red kitchen. Pina, my maid, excuse me, no actually she was my governess—it sounds more upscale—who for ten years washed and fed me while she would teach me all about nursery rhymes: “sticks and stones…” and the other common sense words of that nursery rhyme. She made me repeat them so much that I ended up hating them.
“Open your mouth!”
“Close your mouth!”
“Chew your food!”
“Swallow!”
That’s how my meals take place as I am sitting on the red table in the red kitchen, red, red like the blood of the bulls that are killed in the ring.
And in the living room I can hear my Dad and Fabien laughing and my mother also laughing much too loudly at everything that son of bitch Carmelo is saying.
“Open your mouth!”
A banderole, and some bright red blood, Olé! Olé! The crowd is screaming in the dining room.
“Close your mouth!”
A second banderole, the red kitchen, undercooked red meat in my mouth, “Viva el Toro” yells my mother, Carmelo must have put his hand on her thighs like this old man, with his hand on my knee.
Chew! Swallow! The thrust of the sword! I’m sinking, I’m dying, I can feel the red blood in the red kitchen that’s going down my throat.
No! No! I don’t want anymore, Dad! Dad! Help me! They’re killing me and the bull doesn’t want to be sacrificed. I hurt from the pain! I don’t want to eat alone anymore, I want to be with you, I can’t even get off the table if you don’t come and get me; they just sat me there and they will leave me here and I’m afraid of being in the red kitchen. I start screaming: Dad! Dad! Come here, here!
“That child can be so temperamental, it’s really hard to take—says my mother to her darling Carmelo; we must put a stop to his whimsical ideas. Of course I know one must be forgiving but after all there are limits. We can’t even have lunch in peace and quiet.”
My father comes into the kitchen.
“What’s the matter, Julien, you know that we’re having company!”
“Dad, I don’t want to eat in the kitchen anymore, it scares me, it’s so red!”
“All right, please let’s discuss it this afternoon after lunch, okay? Stay quiet and I promise I’ll do something about it. Come on be reasonable, be a good boy!”
Quiet? Quiet! Reasonable? Reasonable?
When I have the bull’s blood in my mouth. Blood quiet, quiet, blood.
“But Daddy, no, no, I don’t want to stay seated on this table like a wooden soldier.”
“Now, now! Enough, you’re exaggerating! Pina please, have him finish his lunch.”
Dad, you too are betraying me! And I thought you were on my side against them all! Can’t you see that Carmelo that Italian asshole who looks like Raf Vallone is nothing but a dog drooling after mother. Don’t you give a damn or what? Do something, make him leave, throw him out! But no, I can hear you laughing just as mother who chortles every time he says something…
The old beau is also chuckling. He takes me by the elbow and whispers:
“So all my life was spent dreaming of Peter Pan.”
“Have you ever been scared?” I ask him.
“Yes, of course.”
“But I mean very, very frightened.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Are you sure of it?”
“Why do you insist so much?”
“Because I feel it’s important to have been very scared.”
“You know you’re very intelligent, so engaging. I am very happy to have met you.”
“Thank you, that’s very nice, you seem to understand people very well.”
“I try to guess and then to establish friendly relations, an understanding and perhaps later… Would you like a chocolate ice cream? You look so dreamy.”
“I’d like to know whether there is any connection between chocolate ice cream and someone who looks dreamy.”
“Have you seen Bergman’s latest film? What do you think of it?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing? Do you think I should go and see it?”
“Fabien, just do what you want.”
“But I’m not Fabien, my name is Richard.”
“…”
“Richard, do you hear me? Richard!”
“Yes, yes, Richard, Richard, Richard, excuse me.”
“You are very strange you know!”
“Yes I know that, I am very strange, more than you’ll ever know.”
A long silence. He’s drinking his Bordeaux absent-mindedly as if he were trying to find the next topic of conversation.
I never went back to the rue Pierre Demours or the rue Lebon… I do everything I can to avoid those two streets… The ironies of life are simply hallucinating, even I, couldn’t have invented anything like it rue Lebon…? The “Good Street”?
That’s where my
parents landed in Paris, after running away from Tunis. It was in a small two-bit storefront where Mom, Dad, and Fabien were selling olives and Judeo-Tunisian food to French people who treated them as though they were Arabs, or pieds-noirs, or just some poor ghetto Jews.
Mother, who used to spend her time at the hairdresser and in antique shops, is now cooking all day; she makes couscous and tajins that she sells to real French people; Dad is holding his head in his hands in the kitchen; and Fabien makes the rounds of the outdoor fritter vendors in Paris who are all Arabs to try and sell them olive oil.
They live in humiliation, shame, the shame and the fear of what tomorrow will bring.
But now they’re in France, they’re free, they’re not afraid of the Arabs anymore, they’re all right, they’re happy or at least almost happy. As a child I never asked myself the question whether or not I hated the Arabs, they were part of our everyday lives, they lived with us, in our home. I can’t remember ever hearing my parents say “dirty Arab” or anything like that… We were like cousins who understood each other without having to speak, never eager to show too much affection but never harboring any real hatred either. Perhaps because they were seen as inferior to us? I can’t tell… Dad always treated the Arabs with respect; he could speak Arabic and was a Jewish Arab, something that may be hard to understand but that did exist… But once they fled Tunis to go to Paris everything changed. In France we are humiliated; we are an underclass so now everything is the fault of the Arabs; we were forced to hate them … and very, very quickly, they realize that the same Arabs were also living in Paris with the same Jews and that they have the same problems… No, here in Paris it’s much worse. Here we’ve become like Arabs and the real French people consider us as Arabs too, and they despise us. The real French people are worse than the Arabs; no, that’s not fair to say. We should be thankful to the French for having accepted us in their beautiful, democratic and republican country, France—where they say—we have become first class citizens and where we can benefit from the great Western culture.
Richard is still touching my arm.
“Have you already been told that you a rebel?”
“Yes I’ve been told many times, too many, in fact. I’m getting tired of hearing the same deep things said about me over and over!”
“I can feel that you have suffered a lot!”
“Oh yes! That’s something really new. I never heard that kind of comment before and I’m at a loss for some original remark. ‘Please don’t touch my wounds that haven’t yet healed.’ That’s from Chekhov or perhaps Racine, no it’s in Gogol. I can’t remember anymore.”
“I’d love to see you laugh and make jokes!”
“Me too.”
“Me too, what?”
“I’d like to see myself laughing and making jokes.”
Richard gets up, buttons his shirt collar and straightens his tie around his bull neck that now appears really crimson after eating all that red meat, or perhaps it’s my presence that makes him grow red all the way up to his throat and face.
He adds shyly and in a childish voice:
“You know, I’m very sorry, but I must go. I hope to see you again soon. Time has gone by so quickly in your company that I didn’t get to tell you the whole story and I have so many more things to share with you. Here’s my phone number. I hope to hear from you.”
He hands me a business card with his name: Richard Benoit.
“Good bye, Richard.”
He leaves without turning around; he walks with a heavy gait and seems much older. He doesn’t look like Fabien anymore but like a poor man devastated by loneliness. I suddenly feel very sorry for him and I want to call him back and console him as if he were my grandfather.
I hope I never see him again, I have no wish to humiliate him any further; he’s just as lonely as I am.
The restaurant where you can have the best meat in Paris is continuously filling up; people come and go and stuff themselves with gigantic mouthfuls of very red meat and then guzzle down glass upon glass of red wine and then they wonder why they get heart attacks. I take pleasure in watching the people sitting all around me, the obese and the diabetics they will all become in the future. Richard paid the bill and left the restaurant. At another table there’s a woman sitting and staring at me intensely; she smiles at me; she’s in the company of another Richard. She looks just like Cléo but so much that I could swear it is Cléo herself.
Cléo… Cléo, the little French can-can dancer at the Folies Bergère.
Monique says that we were all drunk that night, but I never get drunk. My father taught me that we Jews never get drunk, one more silly idea I almost believed in. Monique calls me: she wants to see me again: “Come to the usual club after one in the morning, I must work before one, I have a surprise for you.”
I reach the Mandarin at five minutes past one… Eight splendid six foot tall fillies are with Monique, all of them dancers from the Folies Bergère, very excited to have their first evening of true freedom for the twenty first birthday of one of them.
Cléo really wants to celebrate her birthday and take advantage of one evening off.
A true dream-like creature, with the body of a warrior, an Amazon, as hard as marble, an angelic-looking face framed by locks of blonde hair like a Botticelli painting and a sweet and docile mouth. But at the club and in public I stop at the limits of heavy petting. Monique insists that we should all go to her place only three streets away.
Cléo disappears into the bathroom and comes out a few minutes later naked and draped in a bedspread; she sits at my feet; I’m holding a scraper that ends in an eagle’s claw. I caress her body with my claw and penetrate into her most intimate parts, her breast, her thighs, her greatest intimacies that have no further secrets left for me to explore. The others laugh and make some comments. Monique is blushing with pleasure …
Cléo stands up slowly and unveils her entire body while the others give a round of applause…
Cléo comes up to me, takes my hands and places them on her naked breasts then she kneels in front of me… Monique and another can-can girl are locked in a deep French kiss, while two others disappear into the bedroom…
Cléo leads me by the hand to the sofa in the living room …the others gather around…
Did all this really happen? Even I can’t tell anymore. I don’t exactly know what is true and what is not but none of it is that important... What is important is... I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore, I never did know. The Cleo in the restaurant is still looking at me and smiling while her Richard blathers away … a voice startles me.
“Would you like another cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.
“Are you sure?”
The waiter is standing in front of the table looking bored and inquisitive… I feel the urgent need to say something.
“So now we’re not allowed to dream, right? Right?”
“Excuse me?”
“No, nothing.”
That asshole flunkey interrupted my dream; he looks at me without moving, without uttering a single word, with that bored look of his… I think I have to leave, there are people standing up in front of me waiting for my table. I get up slowly, put my leather jacket back on and push away my chair while the waiter who doesn’t miss a beat says mockingly, looking at me straight in the eyes, “Goodbye sir, thank you very much.”
I leave the restaurant thinking about Cléo or Louise or Katia, Eliane, Catherine, Dominique, Anne Marie, Noelle, Anne, Linda, Janine, Margaret, Michèle, Danièle …
And…all the others…
It’s now two-thirty in the afternoon and a whole day ahead of me without a fucking thing to do; it’s going to be long…
I feel like smoking a cigar! I can afford to buy one since I was just offered an entire free meal, and more than just one, two! With all the food I ingurgitated at lunch I can skip dinner tonight. I go into a “café tabac” with a self-important attitude. I walk up to the cou
nter of the smoke shop and ask out loud the old wicked witch sitting behind the counter who looks like the perfect caricature of a concierge.
“A cigar! I’d like a Robt. Burns please!”
She hands me a whole box of cigars with a condescending little smile.
“That’ll be five francs seventy-five.”
“No, madam, just one, a loose cigar.”
The bitch! I’m convinced she did it on purpose to humiliate me; she’s staring at me.
“Thank you, madam, goodbye madam!”
That’s funny, when I buy just one cigar, I get the urge to be so polite, so humble!
I have the feeling that I need to excuse myself for asking for a single cigar!
Like poor people must feel! Even when they pay their bills they excuse themselves, they want to be forgiven for being poor!
I’m look forward to the day when I’ll be rich!
Rich and important, rich and respected, rich and therefore handsome in the eyes of the entire world.
As I think about it I feel like laughing, singing, dancing, being happy, happy even for a single minute, and I want to forget, to take the risk of being disliked, I don’t give a damn, I want to be myself! I want to say whatever I’m thinking regardless of the consequences. I want to go to a smoke shop and say “Give me a pack of tobacco, the cheapest kind” without giving a shit about the ten people around me who are looking at me with a knowing smile. I want to say aloud whatever I’m thinking.
I’m so bold suddenly it must be the red Bordeaux or the red meat or the Fabien old beau with his red neck.
The one thing that makes me speechless is when I encounter utter stupidity… I much prefer meanness to stupidity but the world is filled with stupid people and assholes dominate society.