by Kamel Daoud
Hadj Brahim had a bad reputation in the village, and he was only shown respect because of his fortune. Or maybe because of his surprising capacity to guess the true nature of his customers: delinquent payers, sly smirkers, liars about the wool and weight of the animal, wily shepherds, thieving breeders, hustlers and go-betweens. With a simple glance, he could gauge an animal, its flesh, its weight without wool, its taste, he could guess what pasture it came from as soon as he bit into the steaming meat. A real mystery, for our ancestors didn’t know the butcher’s trade, he had learned it on his own, “in one of God’s dreams while everyone was resting on their laurels after Independence.” That kinship with the executioner granted him a few supplementary gifts: dogs quieted at his approach, he wasn’t afraid to go into the cemeteries or other supposedly haunted places at night, he knew how to help animals give birth, he gathered honey without being stung, and he walked barefoot until Independence, as he liked to say. The legendary Hadj Brahim, shrewd as suspicion and false as a film.
So that night, I wrote the first line and I saw the true shiver, known since antiquity, like a wave under rock. The old man fell back down from the sky as I began. (The real cemeteries are not tombs but photographs. I have a few in my bedroom. Of famous or unknown people. There’s a photo of my grandfather staring angrily at the person stealing his soul, which is to say the photographer. I like to look at the faces flattened on the impossible window that separates us, me the living, them the dead dazed by the void or striking hollow poses. Ruined from thinking about them endlessly. From proving that we can be the entire universe, its convex navel, then be nothing more than an accident, a juncture between futility and flamboyance. At once both the center of the world and its perfect negligence. The proclamation of an eternity and its clean denial. I pay particular attention to the eyes in the photos, those chatty mouths even though the tongue has already died with the rest of the body, invisible in the portraits. The grain of the skin, impossible to degrade, then I imagine the back of the neck, which is proof that there is a life behind the face. That we can turn around, like a mountain or a low hill, a dense monument. I have several of those black-and-white photos. When I stare at one for a few minutes, I panic. As if I were staring into a hole. Or at people who don’t know that their neck is between the jaws of an animal that grunts and finishes them off like a meal while they go on believing they’re happy and fertile.) He was indeed dying, he looked like a kite spread foolishly on his bed. I knew his demise was imminent because of the insect noise emanating from him. I recognized all the signs of that strange toppling of life into death that has no eyes or mouth and yet swallows the whole world, and half of my thoughts, and much of the land to the west of the village, in the Bounouila cemetery.
I had the capacity to save him or return him to life, brand-new down to his teeth (simple mechanics: you just have to give death a bone to chew on, trick it with a very long story that exhausts it, distances it), or perhaps already destroyed by his struggle against darkness, barely capable of uttering intelligible words, but that would not excuse my renunciation. Behind the door (which had to be closed so the soul wouldn’t escape), I heard the rustling of people in the little courtyard waiting for the end of the session, the sounds of dishes, of children they were trying to keep quiet who were asking for their mothers, the creaking of the front door that opened from time to time onto a group of neighbors who had come to offer compassion or help rolling the couscous.
They knew, in the village, that I was not to be disturbed while I kept death at bay by barking more loudly, but in its mute language. Even those who mocked my talents in cafés or outside the mosque ended up asking for me sooner or later, heads lowered. Death makes us stupid and submissive, I know from experience, and before coming to find me, my detractors submit to fear like cattle. Why me, and not the reciters of the Holy Book or the imam? Maybe because I had access to the right alphabet, new and revived by my savage dictionary? Maybe because I seemed innocent? Or because I had already saved old and sick people who were now walking through the streets of Aboukir like sweet monstrosities? I knew they hesitated for a long time before coming to knock on the door of our house down below, even though there were many reciters and medicine was free in our country.
My dying man was there, hardly a body around bones. Barely recognizable despite the furrowed brow that encapsulated his authority, stupefied with fear, bewildered by the idea of losing the reality of his world, the eternity that had never been denied him until then. I knew him, of course, but I didn’t want to go any further. The rule is that I had to disregard him to find him again. Resuscitate the image of the breath, give him back a pulsing jugular, rough skin, wrest him from the darkness by unraveling the bandages. A heavy task, but a sweet revenge on that man, that man specifically among the hundreds of others I’d saved, among the trees I keep green and charming, the waterways, the Barbary figs, and the walls I support, the entire village, stone by stone, down to the dogs and chicks. (Third page of the notebook: reverse the course of mummification. The title? The Hollow Needle. An ancient history of astronomy.) Sweet revenge. Unfurl the words, reinject the brain fluid through the nostrils, the humors, the liquids that unite blood and nourishment, restore all the water and then the organs one by one like cornerstones, then wash the body to pull it out of the invisible Nile and restore its name, its breath, its heartbeat, the dark vein that brings rhythm to the immobile. A whole process. With nothing but words, a long story intertwining with another, and so on until the final awakening, the grateful smile.
Then they rattled the door, unfortunately. Someone intervened and shouts followed. I felt hatred. (My father worked hard. He would say so ostentatiously when, early on, he would come at the end of the day to have coffee with us, down below. An old obsession making his lips move in his beard. A story that lasted seventy-six years, dried my skin, killed dozens of trees, penetrated deep down to the ancestors’ tombs and the springs, spread all over and ravaged the beauty of the crops, the sky that washed its hands of it, the entire world that was the village. His incredibly long story exhausted me, nearly killed me. I survived thanks to the books in my head that formed a barrier, shielded me from guilt and kept me from gouging my eyes out. I’ll get back to that later, around dawn. I still have a few hours left, which rouses my predilection for digressions.)
* * *
—
My first fall. It was long. It lasted days, the bottom of the well was so far down. I was pushed into the hole while I slept and woke up still falling, dislocated. Not panicked, just stunned by the novelty, touching the sides of the walls with my fingers, the roots of things, the bulges slicing vertically through the ground. When I lifted my head, I saw the world grow distant as I fell, feeling almost relieved. It was nearly four in the afternoon that summer day when they threw me to the bottom of the well. I didn’t fall all at once like a rock. No! I floated slowly, spinning in the blackness like a feather wearing shoes: I didn’t understand my fate very clearly, I was four years old, but I enjoyed the sensation. And because I had lost my mother two years earlier in the village of Ammi Moussa, far behind the mountains, between the fig trees and the desert, I liked dark places with narrow walls and hot breezes. I associated tenderness with burial. Or death with weightlessness. Or dreams with conclusions.
I landed in the house down below, gently, like sprigs of tea at the bottom of a cup. There was nothing on the ground of that abyss, only tiles with frivolous designs, a few white stones in the courtyard, a miniature but intensely fragrant lemon tree. I think it deserves a name, like a puppy. At high altitude I had guessed the places I was losing: the rectangular courtyard, a shed, the large gate, a pool of dead water. I had just touched ground, scatterbrained, and found myself so close to all things, in one soft piece. Water was flowing behind me. I saw a faucet in the right corner of the pit, the pool made from verdigris cement, the entrance to the kitchen on my right. A large window of my pink room gripped the bars that sequestered it wi
th both hands, a wooden face crushed behind its prison. And, at the very top of the well, the sky, as through a hole, blue, inaccessible, barely concerned with my fate and the weight of things on earth. Gaggles of birds passed by like verses of the Holy Book.
I felt like I might fall in the opposite direction this time, toward the top, faint if I persisted, head raised, forehead exposed. I was four years old and it was my first day in the house down below where they had decided to exile us. Hadjer, already a spinster by then, was at the stove making coffee. My father had repaired the water inlet, glanced at the dry courtyard with no grass, observed me for a moment while I was playing with my white stones, even opened his mouth to say something…but then turned around—for twenty or thirty years, in fact. He had decided it was better to focus on taking care of the property rather than his family and announced that he would redo the tiles, the bathroom, and the paint. My aunt was smart enough to suppress her emotion, as if to force me to grow up a bit and leave behind the sniveling childhood of the abandoned.
It was the end of the day, yellow dust softly slipped into things, there was the silence of a dry desert, all rocks and stumblings. A lizard trembled on a wall. It tried to mimic the outline of an Arabic letter, then vanished. I was suddenly cold and tempted to cry just to feel my body, find my face again. But I was, I think, too tired, worn out from my harsh confrontation with my stepmother and her son Abdel who was bleeding from the nose and forehead. The events had shunted me back and forth too quickly and I felt like an orphan, because of the overly large house more than because of the loss of my mother. They had brought me back to my maternal tribe in Ammi Moussa, on the other side of the fig tree forests, to the south, one week after the burial, and I ended up here, sitting cross-legged, because my father’s second wife claimed I had pushed her son into an empty well.
The world then became a series of nervous relocations, dreams, and demonstrations of tenderness that were too emphatic to be real. I was given new shoes, and another red wool balaclava that I wore for a long time, refusing to take it off even when it was hot. I don’t remember feeling sorrow, only a strong desire to sleep on a gigantic sheepskin. Which I did, in that new house, in the dark room with a chimney. The room was blue, then black, and weighed down my legs and eyelids. When I woke up in the middle of the night, Hadjer caressed my hair and argued for a long time with her brother who wasn’t there, lying next to me, body warm and mind burning in her imaginary duel. Then she decided to serve me soup and bread in the kitchen. Through the window, I saw the stars outside, above the walls. So numerous that they seemed about to spill onto the earth.
My grandfather arrived the next day, also falling from the sky, pushed by his descendants. My stepmother got rid of him under the pretext that it wasn’t right to leave a child and a spinster alone in a village that was so quick to malign. He was very old, but could still serve as an alibi for the family’s honor. Despite the risk of the curse, my father ceded to the whim of his wife and decided that his father would meet his end discreetly, far from the brouhaha and the bleating of his fortune. He bought him a nice burnoose and brought him to us without saying a word. My grandfather was nothing but a phantom with an incoherent language that became more impoverished with each day because of his strange illness. He remained silent for a long time, then decided to inhabit the place in his own way. He would walk into the courtyard, touch the walls and the objects calling them by the wrong names. He would despair as we watched him search for precise terms, stumble, snivel, fall back into his torrent of disfigured words, a brutal chaos. I think at that time he was still aware of the world and of himself: it was visible in his gray eyes, in his way of designating things with his fingers rather than with language. But that didn’t last. His illness became ferocious, tore up his memory, devoured it, then attacked the core: names. My grandfather became a stupefied corpse, vanquished by oblivion, and it was Hadjer, his youngest daughter, who took care of him, even when he didn’t recognize her anymore. He died years later, in my arms, when I didn’t yet know how to counter decapitation with stories.
Why do I mention that fall into the house down below? Because, from that moment on, my father became chatty, loquacious, talking himself dizzy, inexhaustibly going on about the time before the sheep and Independence. He started talking for two, himself and his father, then for all of us. He invented a legend meant to cut off the words of the entire world. A king forsaken by his own Thousand and One Nights. But how long and boring his story was!
* * *
—
My father’s first story, the real one, is about his misfortune before Independence. At that time, poverty was so tenacious that the women of the douar walked around crazed, thighs squeezed together, trying to thwart violent men but also children, who were desperate to crawl back into their stomachs to shirk hunger. Eat the mothers from the inside, for lack of potatoes or bread. People sucked on bones, stole the roots from the trees. Hair fell out from typhus, leaving lice exposed and disoriented on skulls. The world was narrow, the eucalyptus trees had no purpose in the sky, the douar was a place of silence situated in the nape of creation and there were a lot of names without children, their carriers dead of exhaustion in their sleep. To find work with the colonizers, you had to get up early, cross nearly an entire continent, be the first to arrive at the homes of the farm owners to the east of the village and hope they chose you to take care of the horses or gather the crops in the frost. So, to ensure they didn’t miss their chance, some spent the night in the stables. “We had to hang onto the necks of the beasts to keep from falling asleep, or sleep standing up so we would be awake when the call came,” my father recounted. And then he would look at me unkindly, as if it were I who had forced him to undergo this torture, before I was even born. “Today, you have tile floors, white bread, electricity, sodas, meat. Yes, today,” he insisted. And he would slip into an easy anger because his childhood had been stolen and I was the thief. At the time, he would still come to see us, down below. Hadjer served him coffee and he would launch, like a swimmer in a pool of old water, into the story of his misfortune that blamed all the children born after him. I was left feeling dirty and traitorous, nauseous and dizzy, always. As if I owed him all the money I might earn until I was a hundred years old. Ah, the butcher! He used honeyed insinuations, fine as knives, a master of ridicule like an evil wind, and he knew where to strike my meager chest.
The story was long like the climb up a mountain: he, verbose and megalomaniacal, me, behind him, knocked out and tied by the horns. Climbing toward the summit of morbid hallucinations, reciting my verses. And it always ended with the same con as in the Holy Book, the same swap: he came back to earth, set down his cup of cold coffee, and smiled at the imaginary sheep of his fortune as the oldest butcher in Aboukir. Sheep had started to fall from the sky like cotton balls on legs at the very moment when he’d decided to abandon me with his sister: as soon as they threw me down below, in the home of the spinster they hid behind the walls, God had given him an entire herd that had launched his reputation as a butcher. His fortune had multiplied in his hands like froth on the seashore. Blood had flowed, and money and honor along with it. Behind the scenes, I was sure, the mysterious and noble beast had let out a sad bleat and offered his throat to save me from my father’s influence. He could have kept me as one of his own and I would have ended up like Abdel and the others, a meager shrub in his vicinity. No. The celestial sheep had raised its eyes with a poignant sweetness, interrupted its eternity and scattered into a thousand beasts destined to keep Hadj Brahim’s eye away from me. To spare me, the sheep had surrendered to my father and given me the power of a writer able to counter death. That’s how the gift was slowly able to infiltrate our village, sending me on a journey through repudiation and maternal mourning. It saddled me with an illusory body, a voice evoking the memory of the sacrifice, and an anguish that heralded my calligraphy. In truth, the old ram saved all the village inhabitants, one by one. Perhaps all of h
umanity.
A mute being, an animal that was once a constellation, chose to sacrifice itself in my place, and I adopted its bleating voice, its dry and clumsy body, its immense eyes. Today, after reading nearly seven thousand books—a figure infinite as the seven heavens—and just as many imaginary books, I have come to some big realizations: my life and all lives are linked to a bigger, essential tragedy, at the origin of time and separation. What I live and what I give to save lives does not belong to me. I am only a pretext. (“Perhaps death is nothing but a being in love, searching for someone, scrutinizing us all, one by one, until the end of time, in search of them,” says my dog. I ask him: “So how do I keep death away from my family?” “By making death forget its sorrow with stories,” he answers.)
A few more years of paying attention and I vaguely understood that Hadj Brahim hated children, and childhood in general, which translated to a sickly fear of dying, of being pushed overboard, from behind, by his offspring.