Zone

by Mathias Enard

  XV

  airbrakes shrill cries obscure pain in my ears intense light the train stops Santa Maria Novella Saint Mary the New the Florentine train station the sign is blue the letters white I straighten up stretch, travelers bustle about the platform women men, men women it must be cold here too everyone’s bundled up in heavy coats some ladies have furs angora blue lynx chinchillas real or fake in Venice there were many furriers for the incredible quantity of stuck-up old cows the city contains the most freezing city in the Mediterranean caressed by Siberian winds coming in from the Pannonian Plain, as frigid as Constantinople and that’s cold, stores with their display windows overflowing with mink and golden fox, shops equipped with immense refrigerators to preserve all these pelts through the summer, let’s hope for the furriers’ sake that global warming is the prelude to an Ice Age, the diversion of the Gulf Stream will make the Rhone freeze in winter we’ll all have astrakhan shapkas on our heads we’ll be able to skate to Ajaccio long-distance Valencia Majorca in a sled the Moroccans will invade Spain on horseback and the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar will finally die of cold, dirty animals apes, thieving and aggressive, so human they won’t hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them noisy lewd exhibitionist masturbators, maybe they’ll adapt to the new climate conditions, the simians, orangutans with long white fur will make their appearance on the new ice floes they’ll be hunted for their skins it will be a real pleasure, a real end-of-the-world pleasure, the last man chasing the last monkey on an ice shelf floating in the middle of the Atlantic and so long, farewell, end of the hominid primates, on the platform the ladies in furs watch their husbands carry the luggage, the couple next to me hasn’t budged, so they’re going to Rome, four people enter our car, a woman in her sixties sits down opposite me on the seat vacated in Bologna by the Pronto reader, she doesn’t have a mink but a black wool coat that she has folded to store above her seat, a rather broad but harmonious face, hair almost white, eyes dark, a pearl necklace above a red cardigan upper-middle-class the statisticians or polling institutes would say, she searches through her handbag to get a book out, she hasn’t favored me with a look, the train will start up again soon, soon it will start up again for the great descent nonstop to the Termini, I remember a scene in Amici Miei, the film by Monicelli with Tognazzi and Noiret, on this same platform, the five friends with their virile noisy friendship play a hysterical game, they wait for a train to leave and give the passengers leaning out the windows a resounding smack in the face, the men and especially the women, and this sport makes them die laughing, so much that one of the characters says this magnificent phrase, how happy we are with each other, how happy, it’s too bad we’re not gay, with Vlaho and Andi we could have uttered the same phrase with the same conclusion we were happy together in Osijek on our jaunt to Trieste in Mostar in Vitez we were happy strangely happy war is a sport like any other in the end you have to choose a side be a victim or a killer there is no alternative you have to be on one end or the other of the rifle you have no choice ever or at least almost never, we’re leaving in the other direction, like Santa Lucia in Venice or Termini in Rome Santa Maria Novella is a dead-end, we start up again, now I’m facing my destination, Rome is in front of me, Florence streams past, noble Florence scattered with cupolas where they blithely tortured Savonarola and Machiavelli, torture for the pleasure of it strappado water the thumb-screw and flaying, the politician-monk was too virtuous, Savonarola the austere forbade whores books pleasures drink games which especially annoyed Pope Alexander VI Borgia the fornicator from Xàtiva with his countless descendants, ah those were the days, today the Polish pontiff trembling immortal and infallible has just finished his speech on the Piazza di Spagna, I doubt he has children, I doubt it, my neighbors the crossword-loving musicians are also talking about Florence, I hear Firenze Firenze one of the few Italian words I know, in my Venetian solitude I didn’t learn much of the language of Dante the hook-nosed eschatologist, Ghassan and I spoke French, Marianne too of course, in my long solitary wanderings as a depressed warrior I didn’t talk with anyone, aside from asking for a red or white wine according to my mood at the time, ombra rossa or bianca, a red or white shadow, the name the Venetians give the little glass of wine you drink from five o’clock onwards, I don’t know the explanation for this pretty poetic expression, go have a shadow, as opposed to going to take some sun I suppose at the time I abused the shadow and night in solitude, after burning my uniforms and trying to forget Andi Vlaho Croatia Bosnia bodies wounds the smell of death I was in a pointless airlock between two worlds, in a city without a city, without cars, without noise, veined with dark water traveled by tourists eaten away by the history of its greatness, the Republic of the Lion with a thousand bars, in Morea in Cyprus in Rhodes the Mediterranean East was Venetian, the galleys and galleasses of the doges ruled over the seas—when I visited the Arsenale with Ghassan, telling him about the Battle of Lepanto facing the immensity of the harbor basins, in front of the shapes of the docks and piers, I understood the infinite power of La Serenissima, a stone lion stolen from Rhodes good-naturedly guarded the port of the greatest arsenal in the Mediterranean, pax tibi Marce evangelista meus, peace be with you, Mark my Evangelist, that’s what an angel said to Saint Mark when he was sleeping in a boat on the lagoon, before crossing the Mediterranean and dying near Alexandria, in a place called Bucculi, the house of the bullock driver, where he had built a church, the angry pagans martyred him without delay, the white-bearded saint, they tied him up and dragged him to death behind a cart over broken cobblestones singing let’s bring this steer back to his stable, in Beirut during the civil war they liked this torture very much, a number of prisoners died attached with barbed wire to a Jeep crossing the city at top speed, torn to bits scraped bare burned by the asphalt asphyxiated their limbs dislocated like the Evangelist in Alexandria and Isadora Duncan the scandalous in Nice, in 828 the Venetians stole Mark’s relics from the Egyptians to offer him a final resting-place in their city, in that Byzantine basilica with the five domes, with the gold-encrusted nave the only church in the world where you can reply et cum spiritu tuo with your feet in the water, Saint Mark’s the floodable—the Zone is rainy, Zeus often drowns cities in terrifying downpours, Beirut Alexandria Venice Florence and Valencia are regularly submerged, and even once in Libya desert of deserts in Cyrene the sparkling I witnessed an apocalyptic storm, divine punishment rained down on the ruins and the few tourists who had dared to come to the land of Qaddafi the sublime madman, they had sent me to negotiate the purchase of highly important information on Arab Islamist activities, the Libyan agencies were unbeatable on this subject and Qaddafi sold his entire store of it in exchange for reintegration into the league of nations, he gave everything he knew about the activists he had more or less supported, closely or remotely, everyone in the shadows rejoiced at the Libyan information, the British, the Italians, the Spaniards, Lebihan the bald lover of mollusks also rubbed his hands, a good operation, he said “go to Libya, you like to travel, it’s probably interesting” he didn’t believe a word of it obviously, a country where there wasn’t even a bicycle race worthy of the name and where you had to eat atrociously spicy horrors, I agreed especially in order to see Cyrene and Ghebel Akhdar the Green Mountain country of Omar Al Mokhtar who had caused the Italians no end of trouble before dying at the end of a rope in 1931, the white-bearded sheikh fought against the soldiers of the new Rome almost barehanded, in that piece of desert Italy had taken from the Ottomans in 1911—Rodolfo Graziani in charge of organizing the repression copied the methods of the British in South Africa and the Spanish in Cuba, he emptied Cyrenaica of its inhabitants, sending 20,000 or 30,000 Libyans into camps, on foot across the desert without supplies, sure of decimating them, he was draining the water to catch the fish, before Mao Zedong had codified revolutionary guerilla warfare, in the same way that the French in Algeria fifty years later would “round up” Muslim civilians inside barbed wire in order the better to control them, always camps, more camps
, Spanish camps for the people of the Rif Italian camps for the Libyans Turkish camps for the Armenians French camps for the Algerians British camps for the Greeks Croatian camps for the Serbs German camps for the Italians French camps for the Spanish it’s like a nursery rhyme or a marching song, look, here’s some black pudding, here’s some black pudding, for the Armenians the Greeks and the Libyans, for the Belgians there’s none left, for the Belgians there’s none left,1 etc., monument to the poetry of war, in Croatia we sang to the tune of “Lili Marleen” words from who knows where, i znaj da čekam te, know that I’m waiting for you, Andi had even composed a version of his own, which involved cutting off the balls of the Serbs and defending the homeland, poor Lili, by the barrack gate, she has to wait some more—it was in Libya that Rommel’s soldiers voted in the song written by Hans Leip during the First World War, the Afrikakorps soldiers in the Cyrenaic liked the melody of the woman waiting across from the barracks, in front of the big gate, beneath the lamp post, they wrote hundreds of letters to implore the radio to broadcast it more often, curiously the German station that transmitted to North Africa was in Belgrade, it was from Belgrade that every day at 21:55 precisely there rang out wie einst Lili Marleen, wie einst Lili Marleen, and the sweat-covered soldiers wept their last drops of water somewhere between Tobruk and Benghazi in front of their lamplit encampments, Rommel himself wept, Rommel telegraphed to Belgrade to ask for more, more, more Lili, always Lili, the British sang it in German until the propaganda provided them with an English version that the BBC also repeated several times a day, Tito and the partisans whistled it in Bosnia, the Greeks of ELAS in Gorgopotamos, the surviving Italians in El Alamein sighed con te Lili Marleen and even we, forty-five years later, sang it by the Drava, i znaj da čekam te, it will be impossible to get this tune out of my head now, it’s going to accompany me to Rome with Andi’s voice and his obscene words, in Cyrene in Libya visiting the Greek ruins a dozen kilometers from the sea I whistled “Lili Marleen” and thought of Rommel’s soldiers and of Montgomery, before the storm broke and almost drowned me in the middle of the immense temple of Zeus, I found refuge under the awning of a soda and souvenir stand run by a nice Lebanese a Phoenician lost in Libya who was bored stiff, he told me in flawless French, fortunately there are a few tourists, he added, I drank a local Coke, the racket of the rain on the sheet metal prevented us from continuing the conversation, the air smelled of wet dust and salt, lightning tried to knock down the cypress trees and the Greek columns the water transformed the whole site into a pool of mud that the beating rain struck with the rumbling thunder in a purplish-blue light streaked with thick lines of rain that ricocheted off the earth like bullets so hard that there was no shelter to be found, the Lebanese man laughed, he guffawed with a nervous laugh drowned out by the hammering of the storm, he tried as well as he could to protect his makeshift counter and the interior of his stall, I was sheltered but still soaked to the waist, Zeus finally took pity, he put the lightning back in its box, the sky opened suddenly in a great white light, I said goodbye to the Phoenician from Sidon lost among the cans of Pepsi and the Doric columns, and I resumed my journey to Benghazi—in a rented car, the exchange rate and standard of living let you buy all the seats in a shared taxi and escape suffocation or thrombosis, Lebihan wasn’t very happy I was going to sightsee in Cyrenaica, even though he loved the movie A Taxi for Tobruk, from which he had taken one of his favorite phrases, an intellectual sitting down doesn’t go as far as a brute who walks, that’s what he said to me when I spoke to him about Cyrene, you remember Ventura in “A Taxi for Tobruk”? of course, I remembered Lino Ventura and Charles Aznavour, I replied as for me I prefer Ventura in “The Army of Shadows,” that gave him a good laugh, and set him scratching his scalp with a grin, The Army of Shadows, oh, that’s good, Libya’s main disadvantage was the dryness, a dry dry dry country not a drop of alcohol from Egypt to Tunisia, tea, coffee gallons of fizzy drinks but not a beer not a drop of wine nothing nothing nothing aside from bootleg in Tripoli, if that, Tripoli the sinister Italian capital of the Immense Republic of the Masses and of its leader the sly dictator whose personal bodyguards made all the heads of state in the world pale with envy, a real company of guards made up of sublime and dangerous amazons, muscle-bound women armed to the teeth real fighters for the Guide of the Revolution champion of the cause of African Unity writer poet great protector of his people, builder of the artificial Great River that leads fossil water from the Sahara to the coast for irrigation, blue oil after black gold, the September Conqueror’s dream to govern a green country, green like Islam, a green Africa, he gave Libya the permanent river that it lacked to rival Egypt, now they grow lettuce in Tripolitana, lettuce and tomatoes, my storm must have been an unheard-of piece of luck for everyone maintains that it never rains in Libya and that the climate change isn’t going to make things any better, far from it, hard to picture the Sahara flowering, barely 3,000 years ago there were gazelles monkeys wild horses eucalyptus baobabs breadfruit trees everything was scorched in a giant heatwave, everything, all that remains are cave paintings by the inhabitants of that era and skeletons buried beneath tons of silica, they say that in 1944 the Bedouins of eastern Libya all became military archeologists, they dismantled burnt tanks and abandoned cannons, recovered empty ammunition crates, objects left behind in fortifications, the merchants of Benghazi sold tons of hole-filled blankets, pierced cans, rolls of barbed wire, and even a music box, the only souvenir I bought in Libya, a little varnished music box with a woman’s face painted in lacquer on the lid, the shopkeeper in the old city near the Al-Jarid souk told me its story, the little object, about four centimeters by two, had been made near Vienna and given to a soldier on leave, the looters had found it on his corpse buried by the collapse of a sand trench, along with letters, two photographs a broken watch and other personal effects that the nomads had no use for but which they sold at a good price in town, along with six antitank mines that the sands had vomited up a stone’s throw away from the body, nice fat yellow mines all round and new and heavy, the merchant who bought the lot didn’t know what use antitank mines could be in peacetime but, aware of the danger, he stashed them away in a corner in the back of his shop where no one could handle them by mistake and forgot them, he forgot them so completely that they didn’t explode until November 1977 during the People’s Revolution, when the Revolutionary Committee wanted to get hold of the hidden goods of this imperialist collaborator, the chief of the Equality Squad had never seen a German mine, he thought he’d discovered gold or precious metal, so yellow, so heavy, so well-hidden in a suitcase at the very back of a depot, the Tellerminen 35 were live, no one had realized it, the Bedouins had crossed the desert for three days with this explosive burden, the merchant in Benghazi had carefully stored them away without the 150 kilos of pressure necessary for their exploding being reached, and the socialist ardor might have spared them even longer, if the head of the troop, greedy and curious, hadn’t picked up a hammer lying nearby to open these pretty golden containers: the thirty kilos of TNT they contained sent flying not only revolutionary zeal, but also the shop where it was, and once the dust had settled the only thing found intact, in the debris and rubble, was the little music box, open, which was playing “Lili Marleen” in the midst of the ruins as if nothing had happened, the soldier killed thirty years earlier was whistling his revenge, his wife had given him this original portrait so that he’d think of her as he listened to his favorite song, in the middle of the Sahara, she was waiting for him like Lili, in Vienna, he never returned, reported missing among the Libyan sands, she learned nothing more about him, sometimes she imagined he was still alive, sometimes that he was dead, did she think of the painted music box, ordered specially in a shop on the Kärntnerstrasse, did she hear, in one final dream, the explosion of the mines in Benghazi on November 12, 1977, the very day of her death in the Franz-Josef Hospital, at the age of only sixty-two, as there rang out one last time the little metallic tune 3,000 kilometers awa
y, in Libya, wie einst Lili Marleen, wie einst Lili Marleen, the last breath of an Austrian grenadier who decomposed a long time ago—I gave the music box to Stéphanie when I returned, I told her this anecdote that I got from the seller, she picked up the little mahogany object with her fingertips as if it were a piece of corpse, before burying it in a cupboard like the Tellerminen in the back of the shop near the Al-Jarid souk, is the last trace of one of the 50,000 Germans who died in combat in Africa still in a Parisian armoire, Lili is still waiting somewhere, wie einst Lili Marleen, I’ll get out at Termini whistling like a GI in 1944, that’s always better than humming look here’s some black pudding, always better, is that the strange martial tune that so fascinated Millán-Astray the one-eyed during his visit to the French legionnaires of Sidi Bel Abbès, Millán-Astray the crippled symbol of the martial aspects of the Franco regime establishes the Radio Nacional de España and becomes in a way Minister of Propaganda, a soldier-Goebbels passionate about the Bushido samurais and warrior honor in all its forms, son of a civil servant a prison director José Millán-Astray spends his childhood in the midst of criminals and delinquents, a cadet at sixteen sent at eighteen as sub-lieutenant into the last Spanish battles overseas, to the Philippines first where he will win fame defending small forts lost in the jungle, until the very end, he displays an uncommon physical courage, a sangfroid worthy of Andrija great shepherd of warriors, he returns decorated and emboldened to establish the military school, then he’s sent again into the colonies, this time to Morocco: it’s there he loses his arm and his eye in two skirmishes, during the war in the Rif against the little warriors of Abd el-Krim—in the spring of 1951 Millán-Astray is seventy-one, the old general in love with beheading Berbers devotes himself to culture to theater to Zarzuela to poetry, like his sister Pilar, a popular novelist famous in Madrid in the teens, at seventy-one Millán-Astray the wild beast presides over an obscure institute for the Glorious Disabled of War and Homeland, he loves to have his picture taken, one of his main pastimes consists of frequenting photographers’ studios, in plain clothes, in uniform, with his grandnephews, with his daughter, with medals, without medals, he photographs his mutilated body, his frightening face where a piece of the left cheekbone is missing, carried off by the projectile that also deprived him of an eye, photos with an eye patch pirate-style or a dark monocle, the right sleeve hanging down, empty, Millán-Astray the immortal has his photo taken in order to slow down the decay of his body, to document it forever, who will remember him dashing and noble, Millán-Astray sees himself with a great moral nobility in these rigid photographs, a knight, a gentleman, upright and courageous servant of the country, a man of honor, he continues to take part in the activities of the Radio Nacional de España, with the aide de camp that Franco’s army kindly keeps providing him, he likes concerts very much and that Saturday, April 14, 1951, in Madrid he is in full uniform to go listen to a young twelve-year-old prodigy play Bach and Scarlatti, Millán-Astray prefers operetta, like his sister, but no matter, the concert that spring afternoon is important, organized for the glorious disabled of the patriotic war, Franco will not come, he is busy, Carmen Polo his wife with the wide hips will be there, with her daughter Carmencita and her husband who have just celebrated their first year of marriage, personalities, distinguished guests some come from Argentina to talk with Franco the Iberian Duce last representative of international fascism: by a coincidence that only history knows how to concoct Ante Pavelić is in Madrid, accompanied by his chief of staff, Maks Luburić, he will be in the hall too, Millán-Astray the glorious founder of the Legion does not know them, he just knows the pianist is Croatian, that her name is Marija Mirković and she is accompanied by her father a rather distinguished man a fervent Catholic—they arrived the day before and are full of praise for the beauty of Madrid, the churches, the historic splendor of the capital of Philip II the Prudent, Millán-Astray shook the hand of this child prodigy of the piano, timid but with a determined gaze, who is traveling across ruined Europe with her Bach fugues, the Scarlatti program is an exception, a homage to Madrid, the young girl and her father of course went to see Leganitos Street behind the Gran Vía where the Neapolitan composer had his residence, Domenico Scarlatti the prolific music master of the Queen, virtuoso on the harpsichord, my mother worked for the occasion on two difficult sonatas that she plays super-fast, as they must be played, she often told me about this concert, she still has glass-covered photos in silver frames with the Spanish coat of arms, the invitation card with its red velvet ribbon, my mother, blushing, still remembers having missed a grace note in the seventh bar of a Scarlatti sonata, I wanted to go too fast, those people were there to listen to me play fast, I jumped over a trill and the sonata collapsed beneath my fingers, I slipped from measure to measure like someone who has tripped in a stairway it was horrible—in the first row Carmen de Franco with her hard features, Millán-Astray the one-eyed, Pavelić great collector of Serbian eyes and ears, Luburić the butcher of Jasenovac, what an audience, just six years after the end of the war Pavelić and Luburić were still on good terms, they still harbored a secret hope to reconquer lost Croatia, incognito the Poglavnik had come from Argentina to Madrid to negotiate for Franco’s help—the Caudillo hadn’t received him, entrusting the affair to a subordinate, he had advised him to stay quietly in Buenos Aires and let himself be forgotten, Perón’s government was welcoming—Pavelić was taking a calculated risk by coming to Madrid, he would return there a few years later, protected once again by a very Catholic Spain, my mother aged twelve on April 14, 1951 was giving a concert for the orphans of Carmen de Franco and the disabled veterans of Millán-Astray, I imagine the old one-eyed one-armed general must have seemed frightening to a child that age, the concert was broadcast live on Radio Nacional de España, the press obviously didn’t mention the presence of the distinguished Croatian guests, I wonder if my grandfather was happy to see them again, those dressed-up Ustashis, maybe he would rather have forgotten them, still the fact remains that my mother was permitted to have herself photographed with Pavelić the reckless egomaniac, with Millán-Astray the old lion of the Rif with trembling hands, asthmatic and decrepit, with Carmen de Franco the severe bigot, to the cheerful rhythm of Bach fugues, to the sound of the piano that profitably replaced military marches, soy un novio de la muerte, I am the bridegroom of death, a man marked by the claw of Fate, who links himself by the strongest tie to the loyal company of Death, what a song, all of it to Spanish oompahs that sound like they come straight out of a running of the bulls, the Grim Reaper’s household pets, artistically massacred by matadors dressed in bullfighter’s outfits, my mother at the age of twelve played in front of those knights undone by age, knights of the mournful countenance marked by war and death in all its forms, marked in their own flesh like Astray or in the flesh of others like Luburić, I too am engaged to implacable Moira, Hades’s niece, in my train rumbling towards nothingness, wearing the death mask of Yvan Deroy the mad, rushing to Rome and the end of the world in the midst of invisible Tuscan hills accompanied by phantom passengers and memories of massacres in my suitcase, son of my mother dubbed, during that Spanish ceremony, by the warriors present, she received the energy from those proud soldiers to transmit to her son an inflexible, fierce history, a share of Fate like a burden on my shoulders, everything connects, everything connects, the silence of the audience, my mother’s hands striking up Contrapunctus XI in The Art of the Fugue, re la sol, fa mi re, do re mi, not too fast, to let the four voices answering each other be heard, to warm up her fingers also, halfway through the piece the audience starts nodding off, it takes a little less than ten minutes for Marija Mirković my progenitor to come to the end of the fugue, with brio, so forthright already, so metronomic that despite her youth she manages to play as if she had four hands, what comes next will wake up the masses, prelude and fugue in D minor from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Millán-Astray stares wide with his one eye to follow the fingers of this gifted child so frail on her
red velvet bench, in the spring light when Madrid smells of flowers and green Castilian wheat, frail but determined Marija promenaded her Bach and her Scarlatti sonatas through all of France, to Holland, to England, at twelve in a cream-colored dress she was applauded by all of Europe, she has already received more roses than she did in her entire life, she knows who she’s playing for on that April 14, 1951, she wants to do well, Carmen Polo de Franco the austere will present her with a medal of the Virgin to thank her, my sister still wears it today—my sister received holy inspiration from the dictator’s wife, I received the tutelary looks of Millán-Astray and Luburić my professors of military nobility and my patriotic conscience in the cold cruelty of the neatly combed Pavelić, those are the fairies who leaned over my cradle, the first snapshots of my history, on one hand my grandparents witnesses to the assassination of King Alexander on the Canebière, on the other my mother plays Bach and Scarlatti for Pavelić the man who had ordered the attack, the games of destiny, wie einst Lili Marleen, wie einst Lili Marleen, what solitude in this train now that there’s nothing left to do but let yourself be carried to Rome, to do what, to do what else in Rome to take revenge on barbaric Fate or find a welcoming grave, I’m beginning to glimpse my share of fate, did my mother know what god she would be the instrument of and in what battle, when she made a brief curtsey to the Croatian dictator and to Millán-Astray in Madrid—maybe she envisioned a great career for herself as a soloist, before the miracle of age diminished and before, despite the efforts of her Conservatory professor, Yvonne Lefébure, herself a virtuoso at the age of ten, she discovered herself to be when all was said and done an entirely ordinary pianist, whose passion for the instrument, perhaps blunted by adolescence, the terrible weight of tradition, and then of family, weakened and became a small flame maintained by pedagogy: dozens of relatively gifted girls from good families came to her place to prepare for the entrance exam to the upper Conservatory, why did she marry a man who had little appreciation for music I have no idea, why have I myself never been able to bear my mother’s repertory, allergic to Bach, Scarlatti, and all the rest, I know these works by heart though, I am resistant to art, insensitive to beauty, as Stéphanie the brunette said who liked my mother enormously, she said it’s a stroke of luck to be the son of such an artist, how was it that you never learned how to play the piano, damned if I know, maybe I didn’t have the gift, quite simply, I was much better at sport, programmed to be a warrior probably, which doesn’t mean anything really, swift-footed Achilles plays the lyre and recites poems in his tent—my sister Leda learned all the piano she wanted to, for years, clinging to my mother like a crab on Andrija’s balls, I was the audience, I had to endure private family concerts on Sunday afternoons, after lunch my mother called out, come on everyone, come here, Leda’s going to play something for us, my sister strutted like a pigeon in heat, put her fat buttocks on the stool everyone present sat down on chairs in a row facing the instrument she sits in front of, sonatina by Clementi number God knows what, etc., my stoic father applauded loud enough to bring the house down, bravo sweetie-pie bravo that was perfect, my mother a teacher to the tips of her toes said yes, it was good, but, but the tempo, but the crescendo, but this, but that, every Sunday we waited for my mother’s but after the applause, I was ashamed for my sister, when I think about it, I was ashamed that she made such a spectacle of herself, a shame mingled with jealousy perhaps, what did I have to show, me, what can earn me my family’s applause, Leda slipped into the mold prepared for her, a perfect young lady, sweet and diligent, then a deadly boring woman who unearthed a magnificently insipid husband to whom she has given perfectly inane children who will end up in a bank or in insurance, and voilà, the pianist Marija Mirković surprised Millán-Astray in Madrid on April 14, 1951, without knowing who this rigid general with the frightening appearance was, and now, hundreds of kilometers farther away, Francis the coward is thinking of his mother and that famous invalid in a train hurtling towards nothingness in an Italian night, alone like a star on a cloudy evening, into what obscure mold did I slip, what professor emerging from the shadows will say to me it was very good, but . . . Lebihan maybe, between oysters and bicycle races, or Maurice Bardèche himself the old fascist will say to me you did well, but . . . maybe Ezra Pound the radio commentator of Mussolini’s Italy will walk out of the shadows to murmur it was perfect, but . . . or Tihomir Blaškić the colonel of Vitez will leave his Bosnian retreat to shout to me vrlo zanimljivo, ali se . . . Marianne will take her five children by the hand they’ll all wait for me on a train station platform to give me a kick in my privates saying you can do better, and Stéphanie the tall sorrowful one will look at me like an angel announcing the end of the world I’ll understand that I could have been better, I know I didn’t measure up, men fall in esteem, ghosts please be understanding it’s the end of days Francis is tired, he is laboring beneath his burden, understand, you who are all very Christian and believe in the bearded man with the heavy cross, take into consideration the pain of Francis the suitcase-carrier huddled in his first-class seat, crushed by alcohol fatigue amphetamines the dead and the living as if he could no longer stop his brain his thoughts the dark landscape rushing by and the specters who nibble at his feet, look there’s the moon, we’ve pierced the clouds the planet is in the middle of the window, it’s shedding light on central Italy somewhere around San Giovanni Valdarno, Saint John on the Arno city of the beheaded Baptist, halfway between Florence and Arezzo, in two hours I’ll be in Rome, the hardest part is over, I pick up the book on the tray, Rafael Kahla was born in Lebanon in 1940, says the back cover, and lives today between Tangier and Beirut, strange phrase, between Tangier and Beirut there is Ceuta Oran Algiers Tunis Tripoli Benghazi Alexandria Port Said Jaffa Acre Tyre and Sidon, or else Valencia Barcelona Marseille Genoa Venice Dubrovnik Durres Athens Salonika Constantinople Antalya and Lattakiyah, or else Palma Cagliari Syracuse Heraklion and Larnaka if you count the islands, Tangier guardian of the lower lip of the Zone, so Rafael Kahla the Lebanese writer resides partially in the westernmost branch of his Phoenician ancestors, Carthaginian Tingis today an ocher and white city capital of illegal emigration of tourism and contraband, with the port full of Africans hoping for an unlikely departure for nearby Spain, I picture Rafael Kahla living in the Medina, in one of those traditional houses with a central courtyard whose rooftop terraces have a magnificent view over the bay, one of those houses where William Burroughs settled at the end of 1953, he was coming from Rome, he was coming from South America where he had sought out the yage of the seers and telepaths, he was coming from Mexico where he had killed his wife Joan with a bullet in the head, he was coming from New York where he had fallen in love with Allen Ginsberg who had sent him packing, Rome bored him to death, too many statues, not enough beautiful boys, not enough drugs or freedom, Rome that died crawling of an eye disease he would write, Burroughs prophet of psychotropic drugs would survive Kerouac Cassady Ginsberg and his own son Billy Burroughs the drunkard, he would survive morphine heroine LSD mushrooms and would die at the venerable age of eighty-three—in Tangier he settled into a pension that served as a brothel for homosexual Europeans, he liked this rat-filled hole, the hashish is cheap the Riffian catamites very young whom poverty propels into Western arms, William Burroughs writes Interzone and Naked Lunch in four years of marijuana opiates alcohol and male prostitutes, he loves the countryless city of international trade, nest of spies arms traffickers and drugs, the gate to the Zone inspires him, William became a writer because he killed his wife, drunk, in a bar in Mexico playing at William Tell with a glass, one bullet right in the middle of the forehead this vision haunts him the red stain the head tilting back the blood trickling from the open skull the life escaping, Lowry the drunkard almost strangled his wife many times—why did Rafael Kahla the Lebanese author become a writer, maybe for the same violent reason, I picture him fighting during the war in Beirut, who knows, he killed a comrade by mistake or savagely massacred some civilians, just as Eduar
do Rózsa the Hungarian volunteer in Croatia great killer of Serbs might have had the two journalists he took for spies killed before he embarked on writing autobiography, Burroughs the visionary sees his dead wife again, in Tangier, he talks to her at night, he even thinks of her when the little Arabs are licking the wounds of his soul, he thinks of Joan dead and especially in the city that doesn’t exist exotic drifting somewhere between the Atlantic and the Black Sea, at the Café de France, at the Café Tangis where the service is fast and fresh says the handwritten sign Burroughs soars between two worlds like a vulture over the Sonoran desert, in Tangier the White sullied by time, among the dings of his typewriter carriage and the sighs of all the paying coituses in the neighboring rooms—in Venice between two worlds in a city adrift lost in history I didn’t write, I drank I walked I read dragging my dead behind me just as Burroughs did his, I read histories of ghosts that suited me nicely, I had chosen Venice because I hadn’t been able to go there with Vlaho and Andi, too far, too expensive, our Adriatic expedition had stopped in Trieste the Habsburgian, I left Zagreb in a bus for Venice with my khaki canvas gear I checked into a hotel in Cannaregio I remember it had been so long since I’d taken out my credit card that it was stuck to the billfold and had little greenish spots on the back the receptionist took it with an air of disgust I felt as if I stank of war I must have stunk of war grease guns humidity tobacco green knapsacks my hair so short my eyes wide-open and red I was thinking of staying for two days in Venice and taking the nighttime Marco Polo to Paris finding Marianne again with the white breasts and something fell on me I didn’t have the strength, stuck between two worlds I paced up and down the city at night the city of great silence fog and plague, I found the apartment in the Ghetto by chance passing by a real estate agency in San Polo I left the hotel bought a telephone card called Marianne one freezing-cold evening from a nearby booth I spoke to Marianne but I wasn’t speaking to her I was looking at the boats and dinghies moored in the tiny canal two meters from the public telephone, I said to myself I’m going to stay here for a little while I think, she answered I’ll come if you like why not I wanted her to come and warmed by her voice I went back to wrap myself up in my Oriental rug and stare at the ceiling—what saved me from drowning in Venice, I don’t know, Marianne maybe, or Ghassan, or myself, the ghost of Andrija who lived inside me, his fury, if I had had an ounce of willpower or culture I could maybe have written like Burroughs in Tangier but I was quite incapable of it, I was incapable of anything it was Marianne who called my parents to tell them I was doing well that I was resting in Venice, I was resting, I drank my meager accumulated reserves and my Parisian savings and took my last amphetamines, I didn’t have any creative drugs, drugs were for being able to walk for hours, at night, to sleep little, like on the front, to be on the alert but this time for nothing, to tremble when a stranger appeared out of the fog, to mount nocturnal ambushes against specters, drunk and drugged I hugged the walls of buildings walked like a hunted man an imaginary rifle in my hand, I glanced every which way at corners before crossing at a run, bent low as if an elite sniper had me in his sights from a window in the Guardi palazzo, I caught my breath with my back to the wall before throwing a fictive grenade into the blind spot, my heart was pounding 180 beats a minute I am in the heat of battle in the noisy silence of the lagoon, I set a deadly trap for the Vaporetto No. 1 the only one to go up the Grand Canal at night, I wait for it with an anti-tank grenade launcher at the end of an alley near the Academy drunk crazed I aim at the small lights dancing over the dark water I shoot I imagine the line of fire whistling reaching the craft exploding illuminating the façades of the palaces and churches I picture the explosion the heatwave makes me close my eyes I got it I got it I sank an enemy vessel the American tourists are sinking into the darkness to join the rats what joy I light a cigarette and go back to haunt the streets always playing at soldier and doing this for hours for entire nights obsessed with my memories, and it’s easy, in the Venetian half-light, to live out your nightmares in solitude, for there’s nothing living around, aside from the dead shadows of the fog and the cries of the foghorn, when she arrived Marianne said to me I feel as if you’re returning from very far away, yes I’m returning from afar, I was incapable of sleeping with her I still had the contact of prostitutes on my skin of raped Muslims of corpses I was no longer inside myself I was in the Bardo the waiting room of wandering souls and little by little the more I drank with Ghassan the more I found a physical position in the nighttime world a new being I felt as if I were finding my footing again as if I were walking a little on the water of the lagoon that sort of illusion and the more I thought I was recovering a new body the more I wanted to try it out on Marianne’s who was sinking into depression as she prepared for her teacher’s exam getting up early working all day running for half an hour every afternoon at six o’clock sharp at the Zattere she never felt like making love, while I was returning to life, my specter’s sex stood straight up like a cypress in a cemetery, I was emptying Marianne of her desire her vitality and her money too, I was pumping her dry, I was exhausting her as I drew her to the bottom along with me, when I went out at night for my nocturnal insomniac walks until I found Ghassan she would ask me to keep her company in the humid silence of the Ghetto, I stayed whispering maybe, yes, why not, playfully, and sometimes she was so desperate with solitude that she gave in, her legs spread, all dry, I hurt her and panted coarsely on her shoulder and she didn’t move an inch, resigned, her eyes closed, the ejaculation plunged us immediately into sadness I was ashamed of having forced her and she, she understood that I was going to leave her alone anyway once desire was satisfied in order to escape the shame and avoid her gaze I sneaked away as she pretended to be asleep, in the stairway my balls empty I tugged the black hat on my head, overcome with cold I ran to warm myself up always in the same direction, towards the Quay of Oblivion the bars of Aldo, Muaffaq the Syrian or the Paradise Lost, I crossed the deserted main square of the Ghetto, in Venice everything closed early, an anti-noise rule of the phantom city—dying cities begin by regulating their agony by advancing the closing hours of establishments in distress incrementally, until they’re converted into tearooms with a special permission to stay open until midnight, the dream of mayors justly elected by old cows in furs who’ve already gone to bed by happy hour, ridding the most silent city in the world of the last sounds of life: the tourists go to bed early, the tourists’ feet are killing them and they go back to the hotel quickly to throw their last strength into lovemaking, before sleeping the sleep of the just, rocked by the soft lapping of the Grand Canal on the pilings and docks, for it will not be said that they never fornicated in the capital of gondolas and romanticism, they forget that romanticism was an illness of death, a kind of black plague of sentiment and madness, they forget that it’s so romantic actually means it’s terribly morbid, Marianne felt it, even though she wasn’t consumptive like the Lady of the Camellias, but subject to the assaults of a more or less violent, more or less drunk ex-warrior, who roughly resembled all the clichés of complete male chauvinism, and still today in this train that’s three-quarters empty I have the sensation of a failure an unforgivable violence like with Stéphanie almost ten years later—close your eyes Francis I squeeze out a tear of rage impossible to forget impossible even in sleep maybe Burroughs in Tangier was in a similar state, beside himself, fighting the black beast of memory and shame the owl with the spider’s feet stuck in a corner of memory, like Marianne Stéphanie the brunette with the long hair the expert in the geopolitics of the Zone is stuck to my personal ceiling like an insect, too many things there are too many things everything is too heavy even a train won’t manage to carry these memories to Rome they weigh so much, they weigh more than all the executioners and victims in the briefcase over my seat, that collection of ghosts begun with Harmen Gerbens the old Cairo-dweller, Harmen Gerbens with the sad mustache imprisoned in Qanater in Cairo, strange fate, escaping the Dutch police to end up locked up in Egypt,
you’d have to be Saint Christopher to bear all that, the forty-three photos of Gerbens and his pages of commentaries in his journal, Gerbens the rapist documentary-maker great director of concentration-camp pornography, in the beginning I didn’t know why I was recovering this information these names and photos right and left, in the immense files at the Agency, at first, then farther and farther away, why does one do things not out of the wish to know, not out of a need to understand, to conquer a place in the world that’s becoming undone, Burroughs in Tangier was fighting against his own violence with opiates alcohol and kif, like Malcolm Lowry with firewater, Tangier a drifting city a city of grand illusions and contraband, lost alone on the thick lower lip of the Zone, William Burroughs is American, he misses the banks of the Mississippi, the well-ordered avenues of New York, the palm trees of Palm Beach, he is elsewhere, that night in October 1955, he isn’t sleeping, he isn’t writing he isn’t reading he’s sitting on a wooden chair his eyes lost in the darkness, outside or inside, he’s smoking a joint of hashish paste, the window is open it’s still nice out despite the fall, William is forty-one, the age of man’s estate, behind him beyond the badly whitewashed wall he hears groaning, someone groans, two seconds, three, stops and starts again, a rather slow, calm rhythm, a man is groaning with his mouth closed Burroughs breathes in his smoke, his hearing so strained that he feels as if he’s a bat flitting around in the next room, his ears so wide open that he hears the groaning man’s clenched teeth grating, Burroughs feels very clearly the base of his scrotum contract, the more he listens the more his sex swells, what happiness, he unbuckles his pants to let his tool loose, in the open air in the grey smoke-rings, he breathes on his penis, he watches the member’s single eye snatch up the marijuana, the tiny lip of that carp-mouth open to smoke in turn and become bigger and bigger, he observes his penis hardening to the rhythm of the man’s moans in the next room, curious, interested then fascinated by the blue veins running through his own flesh, William puts the joint down for a minute to take hold of the plastic bag on the table, he is in darkness, he can concentrate on the groans that continue, faster, stronger, in the neighboring room, beyond the noise of the plastic which is stuck to his mouth, his nostrils, he has trouble breathing, the more he breathes in the less air reaches his lungs, his head completely covered by the bag, his hand contracts over the burning flesh between his legs, he begins to groan too and the more he moans the more air he lacks the more air he lacks the more he jerks his huge organ his ears are buzzing he’s very hot he sees red soft strong bodies pressing against him Burroughs is completely inside himself and outside himself the bat has become a flying beetle he rubs harder breathes violently his saliva slips onto the bag he is with Joan the androgynous he is with Joan the dead androgyne it’s she who takes him she buries two fingers into his throat and two others into his anus he feels sick his glottis contracts he is asphyxiated he crushes his prick like a fish it spurts empties out explodes, Burroughs explodes almost fainting his semen flies into the night the viscosity floats for an instant like the orgasm he cannot cry out he cannot cry out he’s going to die his eardrums are ringing he flails his arms and legs he is drowning the sperm falls onto his thighs the instant he rips the bag off breathes in breathes in breathes in he comes a second time as he opens his eyes the misshapen room sways around him in the sonorous silence of Tangier, completely collapsed in his chair Burroughs gulps in air, gulps in air, gulps in air, far away, his heart flown away, in complete, soft, relaxed wellbeing, smiling he observes a globular drop a white filament hanging from his finger, he looks at it for a long time before licking his finger curiously and lighting up the joint again, the smoke burns his irritated mucus membranes, completely relaxed, the grocery bag on the floor now, Burroughs feels the reed fibers of the chair bruising his ass, he is thirsty, he downs his beer in one draught, does a poem come to him, does a fragment from Interzone come to him, does something else come to him besides sleep, the heat will wake him the heat the broad daylight his arms folded on the table collapsed dirty the extinguished hashish still in his hand conquered by pleasure and death in the blue-tinged reflections of the Bay of Tangier guardian of the Mediterranean—the next morning William Burroughs is still trembling, aching, he pours water on himself in the communal bathroom and goes down to lose himself in the bustle, where will he have his coffee, I picture him at the Baba bar, I don’t know if it existed yet at that time, the Baba Café in Tangier seems as if it’s always been there, since the unscrupulous merchant Phoenicians ancestors of Ghassan and Rafael Kahla the writer, tables chairs old posters on the wall friendly waiters the legends of Tangier have all sat there, I imagine Burroughs there too, Bowles the blue man, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Mohamed Choukri the half-starved wretch, at the Baba Café today there is a poster of the Barça the FC Barcelona a soccer club the Moroccans love I don’t know why they feel united to this Catalan team that doesn’t have half as many titles as its Madrid rival, maybe the colors of its blue-and-red jersey remind them instinctively of some glorious episode, did Jean Genet like soccer I have no idea, he certainly liked to watch those handsome athletes running around scantily dressed on green grass, Genet reaches Barcelona thirty years before coming to Tangier the murky, Barcelona is a dark city a port that smells of fried food and thieves, where there’s dried blood on the pocket knives with their worn-out handles, in the alleyways crammed between the port and the Avenue Parallel Genet falls in love with a Serb stinking of brilliantine and filth, Genet gets a hard-on for crime, Genet gets a hard-on for crime the way others do for the army, Genet gets a hard-on for a Serb deserter of the Foreign Legion, a one-armed Serb, a thief and pimp, who humiliates him and whom he humiliates, a Serb who served during the First World War, who survived the defeat, the debacle and lost on the highways enlisted with Millán-Astray Death’s betrothed, to end up also disabled like the general in love with decapitation, then a beggar a thief an opium dealer and a lover of Jean Genet the sodomite visionary, Stéphanie in Barcelona looked in vain for the traces of that glorious time when the writer coupled with sailors for a few pesetas, without thinking that it was of course impossible, that her own condition as a tourist was the very proof of the disappearances of the city that Genet had glimpsed just before the civil war, money and foreign visitors implied the end of shady neighborhoods, and it seemed to me very cowardly to look today nostalgically for traces of the humiliation of the poor the whores the thieves while staying at a ritzy hotel for the European bourgeoisie, whereas she couldn’t bear the contemporary version of those pre-war plebeians, all day North Africans stood leaning against a wall waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen, the fat black whores had shouting matches with the emaciated underage whores from Eastern Europe, all of them packed in, forced by cops with fast-acting nightsticks to a few tiny streets, to a crossroads where they kept returning between strongarmed arrests, required not to scatter into more peopled places, ordered to act discreet or disappear as if by magic, usually expelled without ceremony, Barcelona wanted to eradicate prostitution in the street and reserve it for the flashy modern brothels where there was a shower in every room and a certificate of hygiene—Stéphanie the curious played at frightening herself suggesting I take her to a pleasant cathouse, where we could have slept with a very clean pretty woman, the idea was very exciting to her, I remember at the hotel one night when she had drunk a little she whispered her fantasies into my ear, of course I played along, I explained the customs of bordellos to her feeling her desire mount, obviously I knew that Stéphanie was a well-brought-up girl, limited by her social class and her education and that she’d never go to such a place, but no matter we were on vacation far from the Boulevard Mortier far from international conspiracy dossiers and serious things, aside from Zone business I didn’t go out, the house of Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen the Bota camp the police building on Vía Laietana where the Francoists tortured anything that fell into their hands the model prison on Entença Street that the father of Millán-As
tray had run I had to think about all that when I went to bed with Stéphanie, Stéphanie Proustian in the morning Célinian at night, I’m thirsty all of a sudden, I could go back to the bar drink something maybe just a glass of fizzy water to wet the inside of my mouth dried out by gin and tobacco, outside it’s dark despite the moon, hills undulate at high speed, this express doesn’t pass through any more towns, there’s nothing but countryside between us and Rome, I observe the curves of the flautist sleeping on her companion’s shoulder, her lingerie shows through her sweater, Stéphanie was very partial to grey V-neck cashmere sweaters, she wore them with nothing underneath except a black bra, women left Genet indifferent, I think, not Burroughs, he had a child with Joan before he killed her in play—of all the heroes of Tangier, Paul Bowles Jean Genet or Tennessee Williams Burroughs is probably the only one who slept with women too, that October morning in 1955 after his first experience of hypoxyphilia delicious suffocation William Burroughs has a coffee calmly at the Baba or at the Tangis, Tangier is living through its last year of independence under the aegis of the international community, as we say, in 1956 the sultan of Morocco with his hooded coat and his little donkey entered the city, nothing was left to the Spanish except Ceuta and Melilla, and to the French only eyes to cry with, even though Morocco wasn’t exactly part of my Zone I still went there once on a mission, for purposes of international anti-terrorist cooperation of course, the Moroccans were very advanced on that issue they had already begun to hide the Islamists the leftists and the democrats in the desert ever since the 1960s, in very dry open-air prisons, in Kenitra, in Tazmamart then in Outita, a very recent prison that had no reason to be envious of its more famous elders: Moroccan methods were simple if not efficient, it was a matter of imprisoning the largest possible number of the poor, the unemployed, of tramps of all kinds, religious or not, for having gone to the same street, the same school or the same neighborhood as an opponent, which didn’t increase the popularity of the government in place but duly filled the kingdom’s prisons—the Moroccan intelligence agencies always had a grudge against us, or rather our relations were always under the shadow of Ben Barka, and every time a French judge got out some letters rogatory or a former cop came out with revelations about the affair they took offence, made obstacles for us while still vaguely understanding that we couldn’t do much about it, after all they didn’t just kidnap him, their Ben Barka, and dissolve him in acid or bury him in the furthest reaches of the desert, that was taking a big risk, the proof is that we’re still talking about it, once again I took advantage of my mission to go see a little of the country, Casablanca and Tangier in a fast train, an entirely agreeable train what’s more, without of course the Pininfarina design of today’s Italian rapid-transit trains, in Tangier I had looked for the pension-brothel where Burroughs stayed the visionary telepath and I had tried to read Naked Lunch, without success, aside from a few pages at random, nor did Tennessee Williams inspire me, or Bowles the tea-drinker, Genet’s grave was in Larache quite far from there, I sat at the Baba Café with a newspaper to make myself look busy, I had put up at the Fuentes pension, on a tiny square in the old city, a tourist for tourist’s sake might as well go all the way, I was playing for time, I was playing for time before going back to Paris to see Stéphanie again and that obscure boulevard where I buried myself in papers and the commentaries of Lebihan the bicycle king, he was quite close to retirement, in limbo between active life and the house in Normandy, and he realized that himself: ah, Francis, I’m not into what I do anymore, my heart isn’t in my work, you understand? he’d spend hours looking off into space, until he was overcome with guilt and began running every which way looking desperately for something to do, something that would give him the feeling of being one of us again, indispensable, thereby wasting a huge amount of energy like La Fontaine’s fly around the coach horses, Lebihan who was usually so long-suffering no longer knew how to approach a mountain pass, that bike fanatic was pedaling in the void, trying to pass everyone on the false flats, Francis you have to go to Morocco, I knew my Lebihan so well the man with the incurable alopecia, I’d pretend not to hear, go where, why, I have a lot of work right now, then I’d see him stand up on the pedals immediately, Francis I’m getting a mission together right away, it’s vital, you can try to find out the name we’re missing in file Z., try to get them to agree to an exchange for file Y., pay attention, read the prospectus, Francis, the A. file is going to gain a lot of importance, the economic situation is pressuring us every day, Francis, the job is floundering, the drainpipe’s leaking go over there at least they’ll get the impression that we’re interested in them, Francis show them we can do more than those computer geeks, there Lebihan was unfair, in fact by complete chance we were responsible for a magnificent memo on The Methods of Communication of Q. on the Internet, Lebihan didn’t know a thing about computer science and he was very proud of it, of that memo, the quantity of information to deal with made Internet specialists almost inoperative, unless some madman sent an e-mail in Braille to ask for news about Bin Laden’s health: in the era of the Web human ways of getting information were finding their hour of glory and Lebihan, about to go into retirement, was going slightly off his rocker, the man trained during the Cold War was regaining some strength for a fresh onslaught, from time to time he’d shout as he scratched himself Francis, Francis, you haven’t made any progress on the K. affair, and Francis huffed, Francis spent hours checking vague memos from incongruous posts to make progress on K., as he dreamt about Croatia, Bosnia, action and the sounds of bombs, Francis thought about his dead comrades, about Stéphanie’s ass, about thousands of buttocks swaying in provocative panties, all hidden by the grey flannel slacks that are the daily lot of civil servants, but our specialty, information, made us capable of deciphering, of seeing the thong of this one or that one and so feeding our desire, day after day, for those administrative secret underthings—in Tangier there was no question of underwear, quite the contrary, I was stunned by the absence of women, replaced by African men, Saharan men, Sub-saharan men, all hoping for a quick passage to Europe and its glories, the city seemed full of hunted, waiting men, their eyes lowered, the whole Kasbah harbored timorous illegal immigrants and obese smugglers, a whole country waiting, Tangier stopover city where human trafficking replaced the contraband of drugs weapons and influences, all those poor guys in limbo had to survive waiting for their passage to Spain, the Fuentes pension looked like dozens of others, the more or less friendly staff appreciated Western tourists, as for me I was tempted to set off for Algeciras with a load of illegal immigrants, to become illegal myself, to disappear, to forget Francis the ex-warrior low-level spy Stéphanie the great strategist Lebihan the bicyclist and the whole works, I should have, I should have, if I think about it I was on the point of changing my life three times, once in Venice in the black water of a canal, once in Tangier in a sleazy hotel, once more today, done, that’s it, my name is Yvan Deroy the mad, every time an angel appeared, every time there was a divine intervention a miracle like they say to put me back on the rails that are guiding me now to Rome, in Tangier I was wandering through the alleyways of the Medina or by the sea, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, haunted by Burroughs drugs and death, pursued by Stéphanie and our relationship that was becoming more difficult by the day, by the suitcase that was getting heavier and that I imagined would sink me in a boat in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar: in Tingis the Phoenician the saint turned out to be an old Riffian with thick grey curly hair, his mustache almost white, who was drinking beer in a crowded noisy café, as I was killing time leafing through Naked Lunch without understanding a word at the next table over, he spoke to me first, he asked me you are French? and after I absentmindedly agreed he went on I don’t like the French, with a big smile, I immediately took to him, I said me neither, me neither I don’t specially like the French, or anyone else for that matter, the old man’s name was Mohamed Choukri he was a writer, known as the White Wolf in Tangier which
he had been crisscrossing for forty years, he knew all the taverns all the whores with the suppurating wombs all the foreigners drawn by exoticism by the troubling delicacy of those morbid lands he had known Bowles and Genet he was a little pitiful with his hobo’s soft plastic bag in which he lugged around his complete works to sell to tourists, aware of being a living legend, a piece of the city, gnawed like it by the Crab, Choukri said to me I have three distinct and independent cancers, believe it or not, they could have been named like the nails that crucified Christ, poverty, violence, and corruption, he had the three cancers of Tangier old Mohamed with the first name of the Prophet, he was dying, I bought his novels from him For Bread Alone and Time of Errors, whose titles seemed to me wonderfully appropriate, Choukri asked me if I had come for the kif, the boys, or the nostalgia and I was hard put to reply, what could I have said, I came because Burroughs killed his wife, or something like that, that didn’t hold up, I came because Burroughs almost died asphyxiated jacking off with a plastic bag over his head, I came because I was trying to cure myself of my own cancer, I ended up muttering I came to take a patera to Andalusia, he smiled, ah you’re a journalist, there are a lot who make the trip, it’s the latest fashionable subject, I wanted to say no, I wasn’t a journalist but a spy, Choukri the dying asked me to buy him a beer, I ordered two, don’t worry, your paper will pay, he was always smiling with caustic irony, every five minutes someone came over to him to shake his hand, he who had eaten his own mother’s heart during the famines of the 1940s in the Rif, he was so hungry, he who had gotten lost in the big city just before independence, who had followed Jean Genet and sought his friendship out of self-interest, as Genet himself would have done with others twenty years earlier, Choukri his youth spoiled by poverty and the ignorant stupidity of his family redeemed himself, he became a writer by sucking the talent of Genet, Williams, and Bowles, who didn’t ask for anything better, Choukri hoisted himself up to the light by walking on those famous old men for whom he didn’t really hide his scorn, or at least his reservations, Saint Genet got angry at him when he learned about the publication of Jean Genet in Tangier, and now Mohamed Choukri the man of resentment eaten away by cancer was drinking his final beers and telling me about the riots of 1952, the international authorities harshly repressed the demonstrations for independence, Mohamed was seventeen, at the Grand Souk Square the army set up a machine gun battery and began firing at the crowd, Choukri said that he had seen his first corpse killed by a bullet there, he had seen people dead before from hunger disease or stabbing but never anyone killed by firearms, a large-caliber one at that, and he had been strongly impressed by the power of the projectile, the way men were killed in mid-flight he said, bullet-riddled dead even before they hit the ground, leaving bodies that were seemingly free of violence, face to the ground, the blood that was slowly spreading over the clothes contrasted with the panic of the crowd running in all directions to the rhythm of the machine gun, I thought about Burroughs shooting a bullet point-blank into his wife’s head, of Lowry strangling Margerie, of Cervantes three times bested, in Barcelona, in Lepanto, in Algiers, maybe Choukri too became a writer at that exact instant, when his father beat his submissive mother more out of habit than for pleasure, when he was forced to steal to eat and finally when he ran to take refuge in the Kasbah to escape the gunfire, humiliated by the three powers, familial, economic, and political, I looked at Mohamed the grey in that cheap bar in Tangier next to the smoke-yellowed poster for the Barcelona soccer club, Choukri with his air of a celestial tramp, pretentious and humble at the same time, close to the end, maybe already blind to the world around him, turned towards himself his story his tragedies his masks without ever emerging from them, he will always be the haggard emaciated abused child of the Rif, he will always be the teenager running to escape the French and Spanish bullets, and I tell myself that even if I took a boat headed for Europe as an illegal immigrant I’d still be myself, Francis son of his parents, son of the Croatian woman and the Frenchman, of the pianist and the engineer, the way they say Achilles son of Peleus, Ajax son of Telamon, Antilochus son of Nestor, we’re all going to rest on Leuke the White Island in the mouth of the Danube, all the sons of their fathers’ fate, whether they’re called Hunger, Courage, or Pain, we will not become immortal like Diomedes son of Tydeus changed into a peacock, we’re all going to conk out, kick the bucket, and find a pretty resting-place, Mohamed Choukri the greedy generous down-and-out is already in the ground, Burroughs the elite marksman and Lowry the drunkard too, even the Pope is going to drop the crozier any minute now, me too, maybe I should give up the fight and give in to death and defeat, admit I’m beaten and go back to irony and to the black galleys like Cervantes, but to where, it’s too late, I could have gotten out in Florence now it’s too late, no more stops before the final destination, I’ll have to follow it through to the end, I’ll have to let myself be carried to Rome and continue the battle, the fight against the Trojans great tamers of mares, against myself my memories and my dead who are watching me, making faces