by Kamel Daoud
I went back home and curled up as my grandfather used to, head between my knees, hands on the back of my neck like a prisoner. And my fear morphed into anger, because I didn’t want to endure his fate, lose my words. The Law of Necessity flowed from the spring of that first vision, between the end of childhood and puberty. The proof of a mechanism that would push me to reflect on how to escape from the prison of my family, from their way of living and turning a blind eye to the facts, from their tricks.
At certain times in my adolescence, I couldn’t tolerate a single word that came from the mouths of my relatives, their sighs, the story of their pilgrimage, their orgasms, their salaries paid by the State. Everything was odious, small, and provoked my scorn. I mocked them out of spite. And nothing escaped my laughter, not even Hadjer’s face, hard and protective. I felt I was looking at my universe through a magnifying glass that heightened its ugliness. An infinitesimal and severe prophet. A small world destined for the slaughterhouse and ridicule, arrogant in its way of explaining the world, deprived of stories capable of saving it except for its Holy Book, recited on a loop to exorcise anguish. Even more humiliating was the idea of eternal paradise (Everyone was always describing it, planting trees in it and going into detail about its pleasures and rivers, nodding their heads with gravity and patience. They all told me that God gave life here on earth to the Westerners and reserved the beyond for us, who had been cheated by an insane and idiotic wager) that emptied our universe and transformed it into a waiting room, a nomadic encampment. To my young eyes, it was suddenly nothing but sandstorms we tried to fight with verses and genuflections. Memories of crude voices, as though slowed down by the lowing, by the daily frustrations, because I didn’t eat meat, by fermenting jealousies between women and rotten teeth in the mouths of men. If God loved beauty, how could there be so much ugliness before my eyes? If life was impurity, why were we subject to it? The worst was that feeling of insufficiency, that hollow in the stomach that obsessed me like hunger before my penis was alert enough to fill the void. I don’t know how I managed to survive, frankly, to arrive at the port of this language. Perhaps through an intuition about a salvation different from that of my relatives, through fear, or through cowardice.
Of course I tried faith, but it wasn’t enough. There was something stubborn in me, and, according to my readings of the Tradition, the son of a prophet was never the best believer. Look at the son of Nuh, Noah in the other Book, whom I adored, sitting on his mountain, drowned and dignified, refusing the ark or the plains. “I will go take refuge on a mountain that will protect me from the waves,” says the Holy Book. Why did God need my faith to believe in himself? And what was this business that demanded the defeat of my body in exchange for paradise? Jealous of my clay? Incapable of eating without passing through my mouth? He had invented paradise while forgetting that he had no body with which to taste the fruit, so he decided to ask for mine back. Through verses, through extortion, through threat or through seduction. At the summit of the mountain of my catalogue of resentment, Hadj Brahim, with his wart, his nose hair, and his brown burnoose, his eyes injected with the blood of slaughtered sheep, yelled over my open throat. O God! O God, it was so long, this calvary. Which didn’t stop until I understood that the world was a book, any book, all possible books, already written or to be written. Then my fainting spells spaced out, I began to eat again in front of my relatives, and I started to recover. Yes, any book could restore order to the world, no matter the story, the important thing was the proven existence of the order of language, the possibility of words and of an inventory. That was the most urgent thing.
(I drag myself to bed, determined to redo the count. There are twenty this time. The brothers that I can eliminate from the inventory, the three nameless wives I passed in the courtyard when I entered the house up top, the five garbage collectors. I noted everything, the descriptions of their faces, their expressions, the condition of their teeth. I have three days. A door slams in the entryway, I recognize the sound of its heavy wood. Hadjer on a crusade against infanticide, I tell myself. Or on a mission to test the waters with the neighbors. The house falls into this delicious silence that strips me even of my body, if I remain immobile. Rare moments when the world rejuvenates without saying a word. What title should I start with? My Mother’s Castle. Or Robinson Crusoe, that disconcerting moment when he finds an impossible footprint on a barely outlined island, still untouched and unknown. A moment of short-lived panic on my bed. I also love the moment when, in The Mysterious Island, Smith discovers the cave and his inner architect emerges. I’ll go to sleep pondering this today.)
I have to explain this famous Law of Necessity. The pearl of my ocean, the proof of my gift. The mechanics that have allowed me to counter my death and the deaths of others. For all laws are cogs. I began with the smallest.
7
In the summer, I like to sleep almost the entire day, relishing the excess like a drug. Ditch the sun, the village, its customs, and the potential visitors who might show up at our house down below. Spared from earning my keep like everyone else, with no wife or children, I sleep at odds with the darkness: the whole day inert on my bed, at night watching over other people breathing, inventorying vines, faces, and synonyms. At dusk, I often get up with a sort of vertigo, a distance between me and the objects that perturb the ritual of time. I savor that sensation of weightlessness that comes from the disorientation (decomposing time is the first step toward ecstasy, according to shamans, necessary before you can break out of the enclosure). When everyone else is already dozing, tired, I study the night at its flared birth, attentive to its rituals that restore the infinite to the hollow of the sky. And I can keep vigil for a long time, reading or rereading my books, as the night advances and everyone is asleep on the back of a slow, universal whale. My aunt knows my routines since I no longer go to school or to the reciters to memorize the Holy Book. This is also the time when I feed my notebooks, arranged like slates, opened onto the white of their broad throats, pulsing like headaches or organs. I wash my face, I have my afternoon coffee, I talk to my aunt about my family, my half brothers, and my dreams. (This time, she keeps quiet. She wasn’t at the neighbors’ house to speak to Djemila’s parents. I ask for an update on the old man’s health. She responds that his sons will kill me, that they eagerly await his death but they’ll be disappointed. I translate: he’s still breathing. A blank spreads in the middle of the conversation and both of us know what I’m waiting for. “It’s not the right time,” she answers my silent question, then adds, “She has two children. What will you do with them?” I don’t answer, because I don’t know. Fatherhood gives me as much anxiety as the sight of blood. The responsibility I have to keep my people alive condemns me to virginity and self-sacrifice. I’m lying to myself, too, because the truth is that I want to save that woman, restore her body, and I’ve never thought about her children. But there are other obstacles: her status as a divorced woman, my father, and my intimate secret, which is to say my naked flesh, different from others. My aunt knows it, but we haven’t spoken about it since my childhood. I’m not circumcised, distinct from others in body and mind. By accident or out of fear, I refused the pact of flesh, in a way. Hadjer fears scandal, disgrace, dishonor, and the hallali of the malicious if word were to get out, which could happen if a woman were in my virginal bed. Do I feel humiliated? No, only undecided about my future: something awakens in me when I think of that woman’s face, but perhaps it’s nothing but temptation on my sanctified path.
I leave Hadjer to watch television. The black-and-white world that has nothing to do with me. An animal documentary plays after the reading of verses from the Holy Book. Today, according to my personal calendar, the world is a wrinkled page. Better not to read it. In the kitchen, Hadjer is speaking to someone, probably a relative asking for news of the death in our family.) I was still ashamed of what had happened the night before. I should have been more courageous. Because of the thousands of stori
es running through my head, I kept any real emotion at bay. I live as though off-center, outside of the village, in its black heart. I almost went into the courtyard, under the shed, to watch the stars appear in the sky, but I had more urgent things to do, faced with the ceiling. I had to understand why my gift had proven incapable of reviving Hadj Brahim, even though I had a clear view of his agony, even though I knew thousands of details capable of resuscitating him, of reconstructing his story. Was it hatred? Perhaps. Vengeance? Perhaps that too. If I’m honest, certainly. Then I went back to my room.
When she watched over me during my former illness, Hadjer had, through her long soliloquies, embedded an entire imaginary map in my head: the village of Aboukir, indistinct in the rurality of my native country, had its own geography, according to her. Interwoven with my story, mixing names and trees, legends and the three marabouts. The navel of the world was nestled between hills masquerading as the beginnings of mountains to the east, the Bounouila cemetery to the west, where all the eucalyptus trees came from, crossing our paths before continuing on their own. To the north, the city was enclosed by the hill. The hill of my ancestors who had witnessed the arrival of the first colonizers in 1848 and had erected their exiled communard tents. The elevation separated us from the big city and the sea, which I had never seen except on television, gray and exiled. As for the south, that’s where my great-grandmother was from, a rug weaver and the owner of her tribe’s last horses, before the first wave of famine at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Depending on the geography, the south was strewn with other villages like ours, up to the high plateaus. then to the Sahara with its assaults of sandstorms at the end of every summer. But, so the story goes, the voyage came to a sudden end when they took a wrong turn that brought all the travelers back home, unbeknownst to them. According to Hadjer, when the night was long and my fear atrocious (my hair anointed with oil and my temples compressed by a coarse scarf), the cartography of the beyond was simple: a contemptuous city, to the north, that watched over the sea (“Your grandfather Hbib would go there barefoot, put on new espadrilles when he arrived, go about his business, and then take off his shoes when he started back on the road to Aboukir,” she said. “That’s how he kept the same pair for a decade,” she added, proud to teach me frugality), the hill (“They don’t even come up to your ankle, your half brothers, they envy your beauty and your gift of interpreting dreams in books; and you never pushed Abdel into the ravine to kill him. Never”), and the big thorny circle of a forest of Barbary fig trees that surrounded us infinitely, protecting us but keeping us from leaving, from abandoning our mothers or from traveling. (“Your uncle Chaabane managed to cross it at twenty years old, but once in France, his mind turned slow, stupid. It was a way of protecting himself from sadness. When he returned, for the summers, he would bring us bananas, apples, and francs.”)
And where was my mother’s village? We reached it leaving her skin among the thorns. “That’s what killed her.” How did I get back to the village? “An uncle brought you back and left you at the doorstep of the house up top, then he disappeared, leaving a bit of money and a red wool balaclava, the cosmonaut cap.” But how had he survived the journey? “He knew how to gather the Barbary figs, as our people do”: by using a long pole made from a reed, split at the tip. He knew how to grab the fruit with the beak, turn it downward delicately (“it’s all in the wrist, I’m telling you!” Hadjer says) to pick it, collect it in a pail, and hold it tight between the thumb and index finger to skin it. You can’t eat a lot of them because it’ll fill your stomach with a tombstone and you’ll die of constipation trying to give birth to a mountain. And the Sarah full of sand? That would be like trying to grasp the infinite, and Hadjer didn’t know how. So the desert became a sort of stranger whose footsteps we heard when we pressed our ears to the tiles. A wind-borne monster that liked to drink all the water and eat all the roots and lost travelers. A sandstorm in the inflamed red sky, where the world loses the trace of itself, asking where it comes from. I imagined it like a handmade rug, chaotic and changing according to the gusts of wind. I felt afraid when I looked to the south, because the Sahara had ninety-nine names, too, and it was also invisible and enraged. Perhaps because of the only memory I had of my mother (a scream and a sound of falling), tied to the wind in the house where Hadj Brahim had abandoned us, it represented the void, death, or the accomplice erasing the traces of my fleeing father. Now you know the geography.
I’ve been telling this story for hours already. That day, opposite the bakery, in the scramble of the shortages of the time, I cried. Out of compassion for my people: my other aunt and her endless migraines; my grandfather and his silent life; our neighbors, one by one; Taibia the old woman; the one-legged Aadjal, who collapsed one morning and was found in the fields at noon; Hakim, my cousin, who was born without a mind and waited for it for thirty years until he died foolishly; my uncle, who crossed the sea and left half of his body there. I cried over the lack of food, the greed it brought to their eyes, the scarcity of flour and the sadness of the television, which we could only turn on at dusk to watch black-and-white series. Everything was futile and hopeless like the life of a slave unaware of his fate.
There’s nothing else to say: the real meaning of the world was in books, and that language (this very one, before my eyes and fingers, still able to save a life at the top of the hill, the tool of my talent and the fruit of my autodidactic learning, filling my umpteenth notebook) offered me the essential. Everyone had to be included. Everything had to be indexed, inventoried, classified, designated, named to keep from sinking into the weeds of the island my village symbolized. Poll, the enigmatic parrot in Robinson Crusoe, this third character to whom no one pays any attention, possessed the colors of a beautiful secret language that I enriched patiently, like a miniaturist. A little voice was already saying to me: Who remembers the ancestors today? And who must save this world from oblivion? Surely not the person who recites the Holy Book without understanding it, but rather the one who writes without stopping except to take care of his needs, eat, or gather his strength with rest. I was the only one capable.
Hadjer understood: “I’ll have my revenge on every last one of them. I don’t care who’s dead or dying. No one touches my son,” she yelled at the neighbor. I said nothing, out of laziness. In truth, it’s my fault: I could barely write even one or two pages. It illuminated a distant candle in the fighting body but it wasn’t enough to vanquish the gnawing of death. I swore, shouting at the horde of half brothers, that the old man had turned his head toward me, that he had looked at me with a thousand words in his eyes, that he had even shed a tear, but they found no trace of it on his face and the scene of the miracle was vandalized by the stamping and insults that sullied everything. After that night of doubt about my gift, chased out of the dying Hadj Brahim’s house, I slept poorly, silent, blood in my nose, body aching as though I’d been wrestling. I suddenly remembered the dream from that summer day I spent sleeping, agitated: a monkey sat on my chest, bit me when I tried to push it off, suffocated me while laughing in its spasmodic language.
8
Another two nights including this one. A starry reprieve. It’s always like this, guided by a rhythm that might stem from superstition. Like how I always step into the bathroom with my left foot, or put on my right shoe first, or gather all the keys found on the ground during my nightly inspections of the village, never shake anyone’s hand, study the calligraphy in dry tree branches, and such things. I had been chased out by my half brothers, kicked, brutalized by their anger, their spite, and there’s very little chance I’ll be summoned again, or be able to return to Hadj Brahim’s bedside. The whole tribe will now block my efforts. And yet I have to find a way to sit next to him, watch over him, wake him (cloaked in a sheepskin to escape the giant, disguised as a beggar, hidden in a jar like the thirty-ninth thief, concealed by a woman’s veil, invisible by the force of an invocation or crying with regret and anger in front of
my half brothers, on a flying carpet woven into a pilot’s scarf? “Choose,” says my inner dog).
According to my law, I had a reprieve of three full days between the moment when I met a dying person or a passerby and the moment of their death if I didn’t write about them, even something made up, even with the title of a book I hadn’t yet read, even with a single powerful metaphor, delaying degradation, reducing time like an equation or an embrace. So I have to go back, as quickly as possible. With Hadjer this time. It’s the only solution. She’ll know how to create the opportunity and distract my rivals. I wrote a single phrase in the last few hours and contemplated it: “Language is the impetuous slope of silence.” Then I opened a book on Persian myths, read it until morning, and finished by writing another letter to Djemila, who doesn’t know how to read or write, to communicate my ardor and my notion of salvation. In vain. Do I love her? Yes. I feel guilty when I evoke her fate and I know that, for her, writing will never be enough to wrest her from death and give her back a whole body. At twenty-four years old, she’s divorced (spurned perhaps) with two little girls, and thus condemned to go through life decapitated, only showing her head out the window. I will save her not by writing but by telling her a story that will heal her decapitation and help her regain the use of her hands and her senses. The idea is hazy, fragile, still insincere. But her fate is somehow linked to mine. I think more and more that, in her case, the story I have to imagine must use even my body. Perhaps love is nothing but solidarity, a form of waiting together.
Then I slept like a storyteller who goes back home with his own ashes to revive at the next vigil. The dawn muezzin had given me the signal.
9
At dusk on the second day, that sentence took on its full meaning in the orange light: to write is to illuminate. So I tried to understand what had happened. (What title should I use for this notebook? The Rosy Crucifixion, perhaps. Sometimes I like writing when I wake up, on an empty stomach, before my body impedes my weightlessness. I cultivate this vertigo like a premise in my world of inversed hours.) Why did this gift, which has saved hundreds of people, which keeps watch over the faces, names, and angles of the village, cede to panic and stampede? I can’t remember a similar occurrence, except maybe at the beginning, when I was knocking on doors to offer care for the ill. But there, up on the hill, I proved to be an inadequate healer even though it was the moment I had always secretly dreamed of. I had imagined my father’s death so many times that I had rendered him immortal. But it was the chance to repair everything, his death and the malaise within me, my body, my voice, my fainting spells at the sight of blood. I didn’t know how to resist my fear that he wasn’t truly dying, that he might start talking again to mock me and my gift, grab his cane to beat me.