The Hospital
Page 4
I rose to go see my first death.
When the old man’s passing was announced, his roommates immediately set to robbing him, scrambling after his meager loot: his threadbare babouches, a few intact mandarins, and a barely touched chocolate bar. “Hey now, cocksucker!” The guy yelling this is tall; he straightens up, and there’s a free-for-all to divide the spoils and avenge slights in a manly brawl. “Damn Satan! come on you Muslims, damn Satan!” A Quranic schoolteacher intervenes, but the Muslims don’t have time to damn anything, since now two other imbeciles have come to blows over a pack of Casa Sports discovered under the pillow. Meanwhile, I’m amazed to see a teenager leaning over the corpse and playing with its lifeless penis. Finally, two orderlies show up. “So the old man croaked?” While one of them pulls the dirty sheet over the dead man’s face without bothering to close his eyes, the other, God bless him, sinks his teeth into the stolen chocolate bar.
I returned to the bed that I regretted leaving. I closed my eyelids tightly in the absurd hope of erasing the cruel reality of my surroundings. You’re going to have to get used to it, I tell myself. After all, death is banal — didn’t you once write that it’s custom-made for us, hopeless as can be? If you shit a brick every time one of us sputters out like a fart, it’ll kill you for sure. And anyway, honestly, you never paid any attention to the old man’s existence, you don’t even remember seeing him alive, so who cares? Isn’t he lucky to die at his age? Get it together, for fuck’s sake, and follow me. Stand in the hallway, listen to the gurney squeak by, and voilà — an empty bed for another candidate. Come closer, touch the spot where the old man used to lie, you can still see it; the dead don’t give off any heat, there’s nothing left but a smell they’ll be hurrying to get rid of soon enough. And look, here they are, back already. Whenever the removal of a corpse is involved, the nurses turn into magicians. Step aside, they’re going to move the mattress out into the sun. Now the little guy is definitively gone. Come on, let’s light a cigarette, take a deep breath, avoid looking at the mattress, and laugh hysterically for no reason.
The corpse stayed at the morgue for several days. I can no longer remember if anyone came to claim it. When I questioned the kid from Salé, the one who was fiddling with the dead man’s penis, he burst out laughing and started talking about the wild animals at the zoo in Temara. Then, in a serious tone: “In three months he only ever received one visitor, an old peasant woman from the South. His mother or his wife. They camped out under that tree, over there, to drink some tea. I haven’t seen her since. But the old man got into the habit of drinking tea every Friday at the base of the tree.”
What sorrow.
What sorrow over there at the base of that tree. If only I could find myself at its very top, touching a horizon, a bird, a cloud, inhaling down to my lungs the sweet smoke of a eucalyptus fire rising and rising in the blissful silence of the countryside! Well fuck it. Do I need my recollections, my bleach-flavored memories to ensure that I survive like the tranquil lizard? Perhaps I should imitate the other patients instead and listen to tedious and mind-numbing songs on the transistor radio, engulf myself in this insignificant present where graves eagerly await us, surrender myself to the hands of a merciful marabout — why not? — claw at my cheeks until they bleed, wallow in the ashes like a mule. Why do I need the memories of rotting, human wrecks, the shambles of the year of my birth, a 1938 populated by the damned, the plague-stricken, the paralyzed minds of the starved and sex-crazed? Fuck it. Through the stars and clouds and silences, here I am, once again a prisoner of my childhood street, the Rue de Monastir where rag sellers rubbed elbows with lepers. Who’ll toast a glass of red wine or spirits to the phantom zeppelins that once passed through the low sky, triggering the warning sirens of a war whose children chalked hopscotch squares or swastikas like cabalistic signs on the sidewalks and walls? Our heroes were broad-shouldered behemoths with slangy nicknames out of Faubourgian novels that weren’t worth a wooden nickel, facing off between two memorable benders before rushing into a colonial brothel and into dreams where their clammy gazes would confuse angels for whores with ten thousand franc bills pasted to their foreheads — the angels having escaped from a cruel paradise and the second-rate whores wearing rags that badly hid poor, aching bodies kneaded by generations of legionnaires, drunk sailors, starving Bedouins, and teenage explorers sneaking out of movie theaters and purgatory-mosques. One by one, then in bunches, the madmen float up to the surface of my forgetting, wearing djellabas, jeans, rags, or else shirtless, biceps and chests thrust forward, puffed out like sugarloaves, posing for a fleeting eternity before the lens of a street photographer. And what marvelous men of legend glisten in their eyes, bright as undying fireflies! Glory to the god of the vagabonds and their concubines with pubis crowned in cloves, I applaud you, inhabitants of new adventures and city jails alike, I applaud you, princes of nights that no one will ever write about, let’s shake hands, let’s have a seat here between these disemboweled trash cans, let’s imagine an impossible dialogue above the gutters draining through gleaming sludge the skies that once were, when everything was in harmony, unless you’d simply rather puke out your cold insides? As for me, I’ll keep you company, no hard feelings.
My dreams are over, brutally drawn to a close, they’ve retreated just below the surface like beaten dogs, my cruel golden dreams where I thought I would remain alone until the day I died. But I haven’t left the present. Like a drunken Buddha I struggle to emerge from the spindrift of dust, I ask myself who these hands belong to, what fever is feeding me. The night weighs heavy like a donkey’s body mangled by my claws and teeth. The trees, the sea, the town, a crystal ghetto, or the desert, yes, a desert is watching us, you and me, and all the others; a desert where, almost like laying a trap, they constructed this hospital stinking of trash and vomit and a sharp pharmaceutical odor. I tell myself like a refrain: they built this hospital to heal you, pal, heal you of your rotten ways of living, of blathering without end about death and an ill-digested and ill-fated life, here where the old man will die a thousand, thousand deaths . . .
except for a student in his second year of medical school, who’s had bad luck with microbes, all my cohorts are illiterate. Their collective library contains fragments from the Quran, shabby scraps from The Perfumed Garden, A Thousand and One Nights seasoned à la Marrakesh, and Juha’s trickster stories. They’re porters, stevedores, storekeepers, the unemployed, smugglers of every kind, the rejects of inexplicable wars and an aborted nationalist resistance, farm boys without land or bread, left behind by chance like febrile, rerouted castaways with a cargo of off-seasons and coarse language, still smelling of cornbread and cow dung; sickness has transformed them into wobbling, spitting diurnal specters, always a spirited insult on their tongues.
“They’re a bunch of poor bastards,” the kid from Salé says (later I’ll start calling him Rover). “But be careful, there’s some real pigs too. You see that guy over there scratching his belly button, he looks like an Arabic schoolteacher straight out of a dusty novel by Al-Manfaluti, and yet he’s capable of selling his mom and dad for ‘a fart in a windstorm’! The other one, sitting on the bench, owns a food stand. At night he used to hunt the cats of Salé with his two kids, both expelled from university, and his customers were always happy to eat rabbit for cheap! And look at that walking skeleton, between the trees, he’s looking for a quiet spot to smoke his hash in secret. They say that he found his wife in the arms of the barber — and you know what he did? No, of course not, you’ll never guess. He was holding an axe and he forced them to keep going, honestly, he threatened to chop them up into little pieces if they didn’t cum! You can imagine it, right? In a similar situation, I wouldn’t have been capable of getting it up!”
I look at this babbling fetus and ask him his age. He smiles.
“You’re right. Sometimes I’ll say anything, it must be the medicines that are screwing up my head . . . unless it’s congenital!”
“While fiddling with the old man’s prick?”
“I thought that he wasn’t circumcised . . .”
“And?”
He looked at me like a surprised dog cowering to avoid being struck.
This is where I let myself be swept away by anger and contempt. I’m not safe from contagion. Without a doubt, without even noticing, I’m shaky on my feet too, I’m pitching like a drunken boat, pupils yellow, facial features crazed. I tell myself: it’s no accident that the hospital administration didn’t put mirrors in the washrooms. And for that matter, what would be the point of dolling yourself up every morning in this walled-in universe?
I didn’t leave my bed this morning. While the bottle of serum emptied drop by drop into my veins, instead of gazing at the ceiling — and imagining living, elusive figures in the stains that bear witness to past winters, or taking an interest in the carousel of flies whirling without end around the naked light bulb that’s shut off inexorably every night at nine o’clock, plunging us into a semi-darkness that illuminates sorrowful landscapes along which my body drifts in search of a merciful memory that will protect me from dissolution — I reread these pages without recognizing my handwriting, and then understand that my hope of remaining intact was like that of a drop of salt in the ocean. The air in this place facilitates the growth of bizarre fungi in the imagination. At all hours I am caught between vertigo and delirium. Every day I feel my memory heal over its scabs; I am reduced to a skeletal being, unappetizing even to the crows and vultures that I sense circling around me in my nightmares. I’m going to have to get used to living with my companions of misfortune in this world no stranger than any other, where, on occasion, despite my best efforts, the silence resuscitates painful seasons. And my companions? Mostly they no longer have any reason to leave, lost as they are in the density of their dreams. Whereas, I feel as if I came here for the day, two weeks, or a century ago, and forgot to leave. Where would I go? To another time, beyond the hospital walls, somewhere that I had a name, an occupation, a reason to exist. Today, my name is a number, I occupy bed 17 in Wing C, I am a rumpled blue pajama among other rumpled blue pajamas, a member of a melancholic and joyful brotherhood that hasn’t asked any questions for a long time. I’m not confessing, and I don’t claim to describe things that I know nothing about. I’m not trying to relieve my conscience the way you relieve your bowels or your bladder, I don’t flatter myself, for the most part I don’t pretend that my shit doesn’t stink, so, if you’re waiting for me to start whining, to spin infantile flights of fancy about my people and our dark ages, then hurry up and pawn me off on to your usual middleman and let’s be done with it.
the night — the first or the thousandth — after the death of the old man, whom I imagine spread out on a morgue slab, illuminated by a spectral light, I beat at my visions with savage blows, jeering, walking, stumbling, floundering, and sinking into the marshes up to my waist, harassed by cormorants, bloodied seagulls, bats, rains, tempests of cries, howls far too human or not human enough. Exhausted, I stopped myself and thought aloud: I really need to shut up my brain, I need to build a dike around my body if I don’t want a humanity steeped in shit and lies to overrun my walls. Then: What am I talking about? You can’t tell a nightmare what to do, and this is an exceptional one. It grabs me by the throat and hurls me into a garishly painted future full of cathedrals or maybe railway stations that trap trains and red-hot steam engines along with thousands of panicked travelers who are no longer going anywhere. All of a sudden we’re alone — the old man and I — and our stage is moving, its outlines undetectable. The old man rises, his penis stiff as a billy club, he slides on his babouches and tells me in his childlike voice: “Come on friend, we’re late, can’t you hear the archangels’ trumpets?” And my legs drag me into a monstrous resurrection. One-two, one-two, one-two! They arrive in legions, draped in rotting shrouds, foreheads branded with red iron by winged mercenaries, in a crush of bones barely sticking together, painfully staying on their feet, searching in their empty skulls for memories of a terrestrial existence with the despair of a horde of old men devoured by lice. The angels direct traffic, organizing the crowd, some brutally whipping along the professional mourners and the gossips, others, whose function I don’t understand, colliding with the latecomers, impaling vaginas or cruelly biting scraps of breasts and buttocks. Fearing a similar fate, the old man, with me right behind him, runs for it with the agility of a guy in the prime of life. “This way, ladies and gentlemen of the free resurrection. Let’s take a look at your records!” A tall, bearded brute with a white toga is yelling at the top of his lungs. He licks his thumb and index finger, slowly, to flip through folders stacked across miles of sky until the next eternity, to get acquainted with our infamies, rebellions, or submissions, and perhaps as well, some evidence, uncertain and unbelievable, of our humanity. How long did I wander in a panic, pursued by howls and death rattles, the cracking of vertebrae, the plop-plop of brains marinating in the celestial muck? There I was among odd characters who railed against their guardians; then among grandiose and arrogant men and women loudly insisting on a proper resurrection, refusing to appear in such lowly company, and demanding shrouds of pure silk, jewelry, chasubles worthy of their ranks, and other privileges. The old man had melted into a crowd where everyone had the same face: it was pointless to look for him and also impossible for anyone to recognize me, since I too — mine was an internal pain — had the same face as the others. Hallucinations rained down on me like a thunderstorm. I thought I saw members of my family, ancestors from our genealogical tree, long dead friends. Someone (was it my father?) stopped me and said, “In a few minutes, we’ll both be the same age. Funny, isn’t it?” Then, an old friend who’d hanged himself in a shitty hotel room put his emaciated hand on my shoulder — I identified him thanks to the towel knotted around his cervical vertebrae, which still displayed the hotel’s initials and logo. He was crying but no tears came out. How long did I wander in panic? You have to be careful in eternity. When leaving Earth with the Messenger of Light in the saddle, Al-Buraq, the beautiful monster with the head of a Hindu woman and eyelashes heavily painted with kohl, inadvertently knocked over a jar full of water. The legend says that once back on Earth, after multiple peregrinations through the seven heavens and a long conversation with an enormous turban-shaped cloud, the Messenger was able to stop the fall of the water jar so that not one drop was lost. (Which goes to show how precious water is in Arabia!) When I, in my turn, landed in Wing C, I had no jar. My skin stunk of the resurrection, a foul mix of sweat, fenugreek, and suppositories. As I was cleaning under my bed, I discovered several tibias and shoulder blades garnished in sections by flaps of flesh that would have pleased a senile cannibal; I understood that the nightmare was persisting, tenacious as leprosy. It’s possible that the old man was cut up into pieces much to the delight of the cannibals, it’s possible that this crowd has been swarming in invisible realms for thousands of years. I repeat this to myself so that the nightmare continues, so I don’t feel the small bite of the IV, so I don’t hear the “in the name of God, in the name of God” of the nurse in his fifties whose gurney squeaks through the hallway every morning at 8 a.m., so I can escape the other litany coming from my neighbor bellowing excerpts from the Quran at the top of his lungs. I close my eyes, still unaware that the barrier between my dreams and reality has grown too thin. I call with all my strength on merciful visions: Please God, transport me to a spring, a flowery orchard, the base of a fig tree, the edge of the ocean! Transport me to where my nostrils are intoxicated with the scents of the earth, where my ears hear nothing but the robin’s song. Goddammit! I h
ear a rasping voice, I try to isolate it among the noise in the room — but there’s nothing to be done, cries and laughter burst out like insults against disease, all disease, against the minions of medicine, against the unpredictable Minister of Health. Then, again, the rasping voice, more audible: “Look here, esteemed surgeons, I’m making you a gift of my spleen, my cavernous lungs, my testicles — one pound of good meat! — my intestines, my liver, which, granted, is nothing but a poorly patched-up scrap-heap, but what can I do about it? When you’re born a dockworker, a pickpocket, or a rag merchant, you can’t afford to pay for spare parts! But make no doubt about it, on the Day of the Reckoning we will be resurrected in brand-new bodies!”
another day without note, monotonous and flat, when we amuse ourselves by seeing who can spit the farthest, not me (I got conned into a tracheal tube), but the others, the young ones, accustomed to yelling in unison, flies open, fists at their hips, who pride themselves on running sprints without losing their breaths. I see them on a shaded path, cawing like crows. The gang’s leader is unbeatable at spitting. We call him “Guzzler.” Barely seventeen years old, he got used to leading at an early age, to throwing his weight around, no doubt because, born of a deeper or more insidious poverty, he instinctively understood that in a world of violence, “things” like kindness and generosity were a waste of time, and signs of weakness to be hidden like a shameful disease. Guzzler used to trawl the western side of town, near the ocean, where city officials had the second-rate solution of constructing a long and sinister wall to act as a folding screen to hide the endless rows of shantytowns from tourists. The children of those douars meet up near the rocks at dusk, to chug plastic bottles of red wine or, failing that, wood alcohol mixed with lemon soda. Fleeing the overcrowded slums, they consider this no man’s land to be their true home, and any unfortunate couple that ventures there in search of a sunset should be forewarned. This is the kind of anecdote Guzzler loves — he tells them with glee. Two or three days before he threw up no less than a liter of bad blood, he and his friends had a good laugh at the expense of two young newlyweds driving around, looking for somewhere to make out in the seaside breeze. Guzzler starts to giggle like a schoolgirl.