by Kamel Daoud
It’s been like this for years, and now I understand the rules of the game, I’ve established rituals and ruses and reached the formidable conclusion that my mastery of the language, this language I’ve fabricated, is not only an adventure but above all an ethical obligation. Nailing me down to the village, forbidding me to leave the territory. Does this make me sad? Of course not! There’s a form of martyrdom in my practice, to be sure, but also a sliver of silent satisfaction. Of all my family, I am the only one to have glimpsed the possibility of salvation through writing. The only one to have found the way to endure the absolute futility of places and the local history, the only possible restorer, the commissioner of our exhibition before the eyes of God or the sun. All my cousins, kin, and neighbors unknowingly run in circles, sink into despair as they grow older, and end up marrying young and bingeing until they’re sick. The only consolation in their fate is somnolence, or the paradise after death that they populate with their dreams by repeating the verses that describe it as verdant and licentious. I am the only one to have discovered a crack in the wall of our beliefs. I am proud of it, I have to say, vigilant about the vanity that threatens me, confident faced with the winds. Searching for the right words, writing until I force objects to become consistent and lives to have meaning, it’s a gentle magic, the culmination of my tenderness.
I am nearly thirty years old, I am single and still a virgin, but I have triumphed over the fate that awaits us all in these pitiful places. The only escapee. Of course, I’ve loved two or three young girls, including Djemila the mute, whom I still await and to whom I speak with scarce words that she doesn’t understand, but my sexuality has slowly shifted to a greater need than procreation. Because of my body or my reputation, I’ve never been able to satisfy my desires in this tiny village, and my need to be embraced surpassed my yearning to bounce around in another body a long time ago. It no longer needs a pretext or a cannibalistic prop for its kiss. A true romantic, I flourish in the immense expression of compassion, beyond the few seconds of oblivion that orgasm typically offers. I think this accurately sums up my fate. At nearly thirty years old, I don’t devour my children, as people claim, I save lives, I prolong them until they reach universal relief. I’m not sterile, but solitary orgasm has allowed me to attain a sort of freedom, it’s opened my eyes. I know it’s illusory to think you can possess the other, and in this need there lurks a deception of the gods. I sense above all that the body of another is a diversion. I’ve loved and desired, but books have opened other doors for me. The devil, Iblīs, is not the one who provokes desire, I think, but the one who cheats it by offering subterfuges. The true orgasm is a threat to him, I’m sure of it, it amounts to his defeat. I’m getting off topic.
Today, here, at this very moment, I lift my eyes to the walls, then beyond the window to the entire property, my own, of the world. The hill up top, where the old dying man lies, perhaps a woman who placed her head on my shoulder. Touching the warm earth, when I walk through the fields, provokes a sensual chaos in me. I swear. I know the mechanics of orgasm, but dispassionately, as when one visits a museum alone, at night, after the doors close. Years ago, I came to vigorously possess each angle, each shadow that works the hands of the clock under the steps of passersby. Even the vast night obeys one or two words that can enclose it within my sumptuous definition. I can write the word “starry” and all the ink of the sky stains my hand, climbs up to my shoulder and my eyes. The night sky is a glittering fleece. God gave me immense power. Or perhaps I stole some of his, lying in wait in this little village he doesn’t know exists. Well, I only wanted to say that when I write, death recedes a few feet, like a timid dog baring its teeth, the village remains in good health with its few hundred-year-olds (thanks to me), and we don’t have to dig any tombs on the western side of our hamlet, as long as I attend to synonymy and metaphor. (Exhumation.) It’s a miracle that’s been happening for a long time, since my tormented and ridiculous childhood, but I’ve kept it secret. Not out of modesty or fear, but because telling the story might interrupt the writing and provoke death. And I would be responsible.
I knew I had to keep quiet about the details of this struggle between me and decay or degrading illness and gather my strength in a sort of invisible abnegation for my aunt Hadjer, for my father, and for the rest of the village inhabitants running in circles around the siphon of our cemetery in Bounouila, to the west. But I also didn’t want to attract the anger or jealousy that all gifts provoke. (I’m hungry, but it’s indecent to eat next to a dying person, right? And here, I know, they’ll only serve me meat that’s still moaning.) The village gendarmes might be receptive to accusations of heresy or sorcery that have become commonplace in this day and age. I had to write, not talk. Fast and well. Firmly, like a guide. In the village, few knew how to read despite the State’s efforts. There were numerous schools but the schoolchildren were still young compared to the older generation born before Independence. The secret was safe up to a certain limit. In one or two generations, they would surely grasp the meaning of my betrayal and hunt me down. Or idolize me. The ones I had to fear were the imams, the reciters of the Book, and the fervently religious who essentially lived in the mosque in the center of Aboukir. In fact, what was it that God said?
As for the poets, they are followed by the lost.
Do you not see that they wander aimlessly through every valley…
and say what they themselves do not do?
The concern is that I wasn’t sufficiently versed in that language to defend myself against attacks, I was neither a doctor, nor a former schoolboy of France, nor an engineer from Bridges and Roads. I was something of an anomaly, with a gift from God, who spoke in a language other than the sacred language. What could they do with me? They ignored me or greeted me with their heads down. My father was too rich for them to exile me, but my story was too troublesome—not interpretable through any verse—for them to declare me blessed and useful. I wasn’t stupid, only discreet, envied and cast aside. Anyway.
A man who says he writes to save lives must be somewhat crazy, megalomaniacal, or so distraught by his own futility that he tries to counter it with idle chatter. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I can at least recount how I came to be convinced. (Exhume. It’s obvious to the naked eye: scraps, handfuls of nightfall at the bottom of the bed, in shovelfuls or in the form of cockchafers. The tombstone turns back into a pillow. All the weeds retract into printed cloth, the fabric of the slippery blanket with its tiger stripes that have turned to scribbles. At the bottom of the hole, the old man has the body of a child with withered legs. My hand moves faster over the notebook and it’s a way of removing even more dirt, of pushing aside the pebbles. The paper is almost wet, with sweat or leftover rain. It smells like peat. Why do I feel nothing in this man’s presence when I’ve been talking to him for years in my head, every night? Why?) I know that I’m responsible for the increase in the number of hundred-year-olds in our village, it’s not because of the food that’s become available since Independence. I know I delayed their deaths by describing, at length, the powerful eucalyptus trees and the patient nesting of storks on our minarets, or even the walls; I know that my notebooks are discreet counterweights and that I am connected to the work of God. We can pray to him while looking him in the eyes and not only while bending our spines. Enigma of my own life, born to conjure and repel the most ancient power in the dark workshop of my head. What more is there to say? My real name, perhaps (I should have started with that, the story of my name): Zabor. Not the name my father gave me, suggested flippantly, I’m sure, while he was sharpening knives or butchering his hundredth sheep of the week, but my real name, born of the sound of my poor child’s head thumping on a stone floor when I was violently pushed by my half brother, behind our house at the top of the hill, before he lost his balance in turn and toppled into a dry well. Later he claimed that I had deliberately fallen to kill him, and this lie changed my life. I was four years old
and I still have the long scar, from my right eyebrow to the top of my skull, the memory of the sky turning into a white hole, my screams, the rope my aunt Hadjer threw to me to pull me up while crying all the tears in her dry body. My secret name reverberated for a long time like metal, echoed and then dissolved into a repetition of two syllables: “Za-boooooor,” while the blood was dripping into my eyes and nose. When I wrote it for the first time, at about five years old, I discovered the bond between the sound and the ink, the incredible kinship I dreamed about later, inventorying everything in our village. I didn’t know the phrase “table of contents,” but I think that’s the primary essence of language: to keep a record of the possible. A strange mirror, my own name, it was like discovering my spirit animal or hanging from the branch of a very high tree. Like an ancient coin I was turning over in my hand. Even so it took me years to arrive at two critical moments of my life: discovering the Law of Necessity and writing my own name, alone, without anyone’s help, hand trembling over the turns of the vowels, squeaking into the dry snow of the notebook. When that was done, I remained silent in the universe of my pink room, stupefied by the immense viewpoint now offered to me.
I knew from that moment on that I could leave my aunt’s side to go to the bathroom without fear, at night or during the day, wash myself without dissolving into the siphon, stare for a long time at a stranger or an animal without the rush of vertigo. My fear of cockroaches waned and I stopped shamefully wetting my bed. “Zabor” was my first word, it put an end to a wailing in my head, and from that moment on I started to look at the objects around me with the idea of inventorying them. That illumination exploded the boundaries, it promised to attenuate the sensation of powerlessness I felt at all times. It inspired me to reflect on memory and the ways we can summon and master the invisible and the shadows. My second discovery would come later, when I shifted from the idea of the possibility of writing everything to the idea that it was a secret mission, a duty. But, as a child, this was all intuition, I didn’t yet understand my destiny, its cost and its reward. I said “Zabor” in my head and I was a center again, a fascinating distinction. I could name myself and, abruptly, I was revealed to myself, in the immense mirror of my family’s blathering. I don’t know how to describe the joy I felt, along with a painful sensuality.
No one in our house knew how to read or write, not my grandfather who was now relegated to torpor and mastication, nor my aunt Hadjer with the brown skin who raised me like her own son, and it was impossible to explain to them the importance of my discovery. I was the first of the blood universe of our tribe to be bestowed with an incredible, exalting gift. I remember, even in my first weeks of school, I welcomed writing, with the first letters of my secret name and the Arabic alphabet, as a perfect opportunity for concealment and reveries.
But, at five years old, my chest was too tight for the sensation and I collided with the limits of language: I had just discovered something vital, and paradoxically I couldn’t tell it to others! It stopped me short in front of my aunt Hadjer, who was napping in the other room, lying on the tiles to cool off at the end of that infinite summer, around September in my memory. Hadjer (kept alive by a story: a woman who, after watching so many romantic films, can now speak all the languages without understanding a single word of them and who saw it as a curse. She ends up losing her own words, her language, and becomes the silent film she once saw years ago. Voiceless before her fate. Several notebooks with a single stolen title: The Changed Face. My aunt is small and dark, lively, on the alert, as if hunted. I’ve never seen her sick, pensive, or made up—except for one time. Yet she is the one who awakened my senses, discreetly, with her long and abundant black hair, which she combed the way one crosses a river, and her sweaty summer armpits. All the bodies of women in books had stolen some of her, or imitated her body in a game of mirrors that embarrassed and disturbed me. She is the youngest of my aunts, they called her “la petite,” I think. She likes soccer matches, oddly, big-budget films and Bollywood, land of songs, of star-crossed lovers, of wild buses and dancing for no reason) was still, her dress hiked up over her bare thighs, sleeping as she squeezed imaginary pebbles in her palms, so angry did she appear, even as she napped.
When, shaking a loose sheet of paper with the clumsy writing of my name, I tried to wake her up to show her my new skill, the vague possibility of not dying, she grunted and turned toward the wall. And I remained there, in the middle of our hallway, at the door to her bedroom, watching her body shunned by suitors, lying half on the ground and half on a sheepskin, worn out from household chores and from caring for her mute and impotent father. In the house, everything was the same as before and simultaneously everything was suddenly prone to chaos if I didn’t get to work. I had just realized that writing a name is like a window, but that it doesn’t make the wall disappear. Now I’m going too fast. (The old man’s breathing accelerates and he might die because of me. I like to sense the night and its cadences behind the walls, but tonight it’s spoiled by morbid murmurs. The whole family must be there, acting as a screen between me and the cold stars. The smell of couscous, which for me is the smell of death, infiltrates and mixes with the smell of acidic agony, medications, and fetid flocks of sheep.)
The truth is that my father saddled me with a thousand ridiculous names to mock me and distance me from his affection. He called me “the crippled freak” because of my knee and my gait, “the cripple,” often “the puppet” because of my fainting spells, and so on. A thousand names that I could ward off, as a child, by reciting in my head the only valid name, my own, whenever he addressed me, stared at me for a long time, or wanted to show his friends that he expected nothing from me and that I was more of a defect than an heir. Zabor! (Someone breaks a plate, I think, in the courtyard. A woman cries or coughs. It’s one of his daughters, tied up in gold jewelry since her childhood.) Years later, old and musty (I’m twenty-eight years old, to be exact, with no children, only the name of a neighbor to address my discourses on love to), it led me to that critical, extreme moment, to the summit with rarefied air where I write (perched in a coconut tree, while a storm threatens the entire island and its methodical language, its indexed forms, its patient tools squandered by an English shipwreck), head bent over my notebook, barely looking at the dying man sprawled to my right. It took me years to get here, seated, silent, surrounded by the wary respect of the old man’s sons and wives, all piled up behind the door, waiting for me to finish bringing their elder back to them like a swimmer. All there, on the beach of fake sand, skeptics and believers mixed and gathered through fear of death, hoping against all vanity that I would be able to repeat the rumored miracle. Even the eldest son, Abdel, brought up to hate me as a rival, who has controlled the old man’s flocks since his childhood. A triumph of virtuosity, Zabor attentive to the words that come, passionately scribbling to strengthen his breath and save it from the temptation of dying to escape the pain. Yes.
(It’s almost three in the morning, the night is hot and blows on the necks of the dripping black eucalyptus trees. A rumbling makes the earth pitch like sensual hips, unleashes its powerful perfumes, and clinks the fruit together, but I remain disciplined and serious.) There were twelve notebooks with black covers left, each 120 pages, piled up in a secret order, to my left, near my black bag. Pens too, to stave off death. I had plenty of titles for these notebooks. (For the first I choose In Dubious Battle. It’s fitting. It has the sculpted form of a man strangling a lion on a hill. It’s flared and muscular, sweating and severe. The lion knows it will die but that death renders it eternal. Where did I see that? I also have the title Starship Troopers, or Castle to Castle—the biography of a pedestrian.) The notebooks? The people of the village bring them to me from all over, preparing pens for me (fine point, black ink) to save their kin when, desperate, let down by medication, the reciters of the Holy Book, and the doctors who barely speak to them—out of spite, or overwhelmed, or for lack of a common language—they turn to m
e, begrudgingly. It’s never easy, in their universe, to believe that I could save a life and banish death by writing something other than their verses and the ninety-nine names of God.
What to believe, if life was not a trial imposed by a god who spoke only our language, but instead the conjugation of a foreign verb, come from the sea, that managed, in the hands of the village idiot with a goat’s voice, to restore breath to the wounded, to the sick children in the grip of fevers, and to the hundred-year-olds roaming the village streets in great numbers, with the blissful smiles of newborns? What to think of God, if he expressed himself in a foreign language? Or a Holy Book that was no longer the only one? I could feel and unfurl their contradictory sentiments, toned down out of fear of contradicting me or making me run back to my room that I rarely came out of, only at night, to walk, sometimes smoke and sit under the streetlights and make strange calculations with my fingers. What to conclude then, in that universe where faith and hope were rivals, each with its own idiom and its own calligraphy? I needed patience and discretion if I wanted to triumph here, in this very room, seated on this wooden bench, in this contrite posture, leaning over this notebook turned gray as a cloud, cottony and filamentous, with its beautiful title stolen from a book I had never been able to find. I had been feverishly spinning the same gray and white yarn, slightly dry and with its habitually musty odor. For years. In the end, it would give rise to a notebook, not a rug. But with the same underlying pattern.
2
They summoned me after the Isha prayer, knocking on our door. The night was still young, scattering the first stars over the trees that had only barely cooled with a deceptive flippancy. Car engines could be heard in the distance, along with the voices of neighbors. The eldest of the old man’s sons, Abdel, the favorite born of an ill-formed love, was there, lowered head balanced uncertainly on his dry body, wrapped up in a djellaba. I know him better than he thinks: he draws all his strength from a permanent anger against the world of the village down below. Why such anger? Perhaps because he knows he’s guilty, a usurper, a thief of something whose name he’s forgotten. (I digress.) Perhaps because of what his mother has repeated to him about me since his birth. Abdel has had to guard the flocks all his life. He knew it from his earliest years, mandated by his mother who feared losing control over the fortune, and driven by his desire to be the old man’s only son. I don’t think he had a childhood, really, especially when compared to my indolence that lasted nearly twenty years. He turned serious at an early age, keeping accounts of everything, fastidious, angular and incapable of smiling because he was in constant fear of the sheep falling ill, storms, or calculation errors. Strangely, his face sort of resembled mine—same age, same skin—but it was pierced by an intense, black stare. He was the shepherd of many of the old man’s flocks and knew the village’s surroundings and pastures, the grasses and the far reaches, better than anyone else. But that’s another story. (I keep him alive unbeknownst to him, writing his story in my notebooks. His bears a title I’ve thought about for a long time, found at the end of a novel, on one of those “forthcoming” pages that have always fascinated me. His notebook is called The Magic Skin. He is a traveler obsessed with his own shoes who sees nothing of the rest of the world.) We share a father and an old story that tells of how I almost killed him by pushing him down a well. A false and scandalous story, according to Hadjer, who remembers my head wound: he’s the one who said it, incited by his mother, and that was why I was banished from Hadj Brahim’s house for the second and final time in my life. My stepmother, cheeks scratched and voice hysterical, threatened the worst if I stayed, and my father’s solution was to buy a colonial house down in the village. He used it to hide his spinster sister, his own father who’d turned into a dead branch, and his undesirable son with the goat voice, who could be slaughtered by an insistent gaze. A simple solution. I didn’t push him. Hadjer swore it to me so many times that now I believe it. I remember only Abdel’s snickering and his facility with the sheep who obeyed him even though he was only four years old. Like me. No, I never pushed him into a dry well. God didn’t punish me. There was blood on his face and on a rock. Birds taunted from up in the eucalyptus trees and it was beautiful out.