by Kamel Daoud
10
How many times have I healed strangers! (Kaddour the widower, Aïcha, a dignified and silent woman, my uncle Chaabane when he fell to his knees one summer, ill and disoriented by the changes in the village, Abdelkader, my father’s friend who loved baths and vineyards, Badra who had inhaled carbon gas from cursed charcoal, et al.) If death finds your trail again, it’s because you’re on the edge of your path, because you don’t believe in your story anymore, or you’ve scattered your listeners, dead and alive. My uncle Larbi, for example, my father’s older brother, died when his tribe’s attention switched to Hadj Brahim’s fortune and sheep. His story fell into disuse and in the end he found himself carried off once again by his indifference for even himself. I remember the cold stare of that man, stranger to all things, whom we found lying in a vineyard to the east of the village. He died in good health, but emptied. A story is a shared breath, a rediscovered body. A story can take your breath away? Then it can also restore your breath when you’re dying. I’m talking about the mechanics of it, but the mystery remains intact. My mission involves the metaphysical, and especially the Law of Necessity. I believe in God, but I don’t try to speak to him. To exist is a greater tragedy than that one-on-one discussion, which has grown tiring. The essential lies outside of prayer or disobedience. It’s in the imminence, delayed by each person, of the end of the world. My prophecy doesn’t involve a holy book but rather a holy explanation of all possible books.
That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for years. The link between my writing and its culmination in the body of the other. The enchanting consequence of a word on the rhythm of a body. Reduce the phrases to their bones, to their strict intimate figure, to demonstrate that Necessity is a law that provokes a return to life, but also a simple, firm link between the living and the written, precision and resurrection, or permanence through memory. If I remember everyone, no one will die, but to remember I need the power of a precise language, rich as a swarm, reconstituted by flesh and breath, rediscovered word by word with the patience of an investigator, pushed to the limit of exactitude. If creation were a book, I would have to rewrite it constantly. Or perhaps reread it, like the former mystics and alchemists. The Holy Book describes itself as a version descended from the sky, but which has remained preserved there, antecedent like motherhood. We speak in our country of the well-guarded Tablet, the Mother of the Book. The celestial version we find through prayer and meditation. The meaning we restore through asceticism and bodily sacrifice until we’re dizzy. But all religions speak of a book as the world or the back world. They insist that the pilgrim is a distracted reader, the believer a blind reader, the contemplator a reader hesitant to turn the pages, and the writer a reader who reproduces. I don’t believe in the theory of hidden meaning. I believe in the inventory and in the preeminence of memory over death. Things are held suspended in space and time because they are inventoried in a mind and because a language keeps them in permanent immediacy. It’s a story of magical encounter: the present (and its universe) exists because a man remembers.
Is that it? I admit compassion. I remain indifferent to the announcement of my father’s death, to his agony, and every encounter irks me, but at night, when the whole village sleeps and I keep watch, recounting my encounters, I feel immense pity for my family’s fate. In mounting waves, up to the high tide of mercy. I feel anger against this God who enriches the inhabitants in cycles, makes them believe in pleasure, then crushes them with illness and death. I position myself as an intermediary, as a defender, the kind of man whose sense of dignity and strength pushes him to provoke duels with the fiercest highway bandits, just to turn their anger on himself, gain time and help the weakest avoid their fate. So there is a mechanical reason for my compassion (the more I write, the more the village resists, its people can live long lives and the hundred-year-olds multiply like victories, exhilarated by the endless present), another reason that comes from the heart (the world is a tragedy, a sacrificed ram, and I am its voice), and a final reason, the basis of my belief (I am responsible for the lives of the people I meet daily, and I can save them by writing, all of them except for one woman whom I can only protect by exchanging my body for hers and remedying her decapitation). It’s a complex system, like gears with interlocking teeth. My gift’s system is derived from meditation and asceticism. Because of the Holy Book, because of my diligent religious years, my study of a foreign language that became an instrument of life and death, I understood very early on that there was a link between our capacity to speak and the objects we designate. Everything is written, nothing is silent, oh yes! The opposite of God is not Iblīs, but the inaudible. I’m sure of it.
The hundreds of books I’ve read prove to me that eternity exists and we can preserve it through transcription and deciphering. All we have to do is read endlessly and, for lack of an infinite library, write endlessly, but diligently: a number for each face, a title for several notebooks, signs and symbols where the word is no longer enough for embrace and possession. The titles are like pebbles. They help me to write, to bounce back and fill the void. (Television introduced our country to a foreign language and unknown people who communicate their passion with grand gestures. Hadjer must be watching her film without me there to translate. I haven’t done it for a few years now, for the sake of decency. I’ll go out in an hour to inspect the village, note the details, register the names of the newlyweds or listen to the loud voices from under the windows. I can go all the way to the nocturnal fields. Where the dogs torment each other. Near the Christian cemetery. I visit it sometimes, because they decorate death differently than we do: lacework stones, vaults, French or Spanish names, verses from another holy book, cherubs. My dog tells me that it’s paradoxical to sculpt angels into stone. The tombs are desecrated often, by kids. And, once night falls, I cross the silence disturbed by wine drinkers, seated, silent, in a group, like conspirators behind God’s back. This place is a land of refuge for outcasts, lovers, or alcohol peddlers. During the day, there is a magnificent, pure shade from the cypress and poplar trees. No one has stepped foot there for a long time, the vandalism is garish. “Dead two times,” sighs my dog. I don’t agree: the tomb is a con, a scam. It’s to fool the investigators who stop after they’ve found the body. Like in crime novels. Rather than going further to interrogate and understand all the metaphysics, the visions, the books and legends. That’s why I never come to write in the Christian cemetery despite its beauty: it’s like writing under a coat rack and calling it a streetlight. But tonight I might go there to kill time. For lack of any other idea.)
The first notebook I wrote was called The Lord of the Rings. The title was so beautiful that I made it into a well, with water at the bottom reflecting dozens of zealous, passionate characters. And when, years later, I read the real book with this title, I was a little disappointed: my story was better, it was about a ring salesman who had become immortal by showing off his merchandise from city to city. And how his skill had led him to sell imaginary rings, because he described them so marvelously to curious crowds. Before writing, hunched and coiled like a mollusk, I always hear a music that sounds like water approaching, or like sugar recounting its life. I’m getting off topic, I know, but I can’t make progress any other way. To write is to listen to a sound, preserve it and turn it over, endlessly, try to render its melody, get as close to it as possible to bring it from the ear to the mouth. The Prophet says that the revelation came to him like a timbre, the sound of a bell, and that the terrible Angel was a ringing sound before degrading into words. I liked that confession, which seemed sincere, about the profession of God’s emissary. Those I meet during these sessions describe me as tense, angry, harsh, my gaze menacing. It’s the shell of my trances, the outline of my circle.
The patient from the night before last is an old man I knew well who never considered my gift something important or real. For a long time he treated me with contempt or an affected indifference to make me feel ash
amed the few times I crossed his path. I promised myself I’d wait, and now his hour has arrived, and he’s here, sliding into my memory, known for its precision, like a blind man’s sense of touch. Revived by my habitual insomnia, words and spit mixed inside of his lungs, he scrutinizes me valiantly, with curiosity, anger, then renunciation. As when someone, weary, entrusts his survival to a charlatan and sees the proof of his own cowardice, the sign of his abdication. At worst, I couldn’t trigger his death; at best, I could perhaps slow it, he was surely saying to himself, lost in the multitude of family members who wanted to see how he would lose his body. The man I have to defend from the tomb is too old, skeptical, undone by his life, and it requires serious effort. Hadj Brahim, aged seventy-six, a wealthy butcher, doesn’t help me. Because he doesn’t believe in me. He’s always said again and again that my notebooks are the skins of sheep that never existed. I don’t care, I keep going: the speed of the writing is one of the conditions of inspiration: it imposes the humility of the porter on you. You become the sweat of the ink, not its inventor. The silent servant of a conversation that’s beyond you.
* * *
—
It’s only recently, in the village of Aboukir, that they’ve stopped thinking of me as being troubled by a spirit of dirty waters, or disoriented by a curse resulting from my father’s fortune and bloody opulence. Some pity my father for his rotten luck with his first wife. I endured my fate like a gift that came with a duty, despite my sick body, the scandal of my fainting spells, and my refusal to eat meat. There are surely martyrs who have no need for paradise or God to devote themselves to the path of sacrifice. Perhaps the idea of compassion is enough. Or the secret ambition to supplant an idle god with his own eternity. The truth is that it’s the confinement of the village that helped me to understand the link between my writing and longevity. I knew every corner of it, the colors of the curtains, the old windows, the chipped cartography of the walls, the slanting tree trunks, the habits of the elderly and the storks. When I wandered to perfect my inventory, list in hand, I provoked the laughter of the passersby who watched me examine the trivial details. Of course, order was often disturbed by the arrival of a stranger or a newborn, we don’t live isolated from the world, only restricted, immobile out of laziness or satisfaction, somewhat fearful. And then I would have to redo my calculations.
Sometimes the strangeness severely tested the richness of my inner language and I struggled to find real words for lack of a good dictionary. But I always made up for it with signs, symbols, and drawings that were inexplicable to the layperson. There were also those hackneyed rumors about sex or curses cast by saints, jealousies enormous as fires, divorces, but all of that was meticulously inventoried in the memories of the inhabitants and in my notebooks. What I myself preserved was something else: the inventory of nuances, of faces, of greenery or rust, the order of eternity that I had to restore and the exactitude of presence in the world, the repaired coincidence between the living and their real stories. There you have it. What did I have to do with the story of the unknown donor who had enabled them to construct a very tall minaret for our mosque? Or the story of the Cuban doctor who had come to live in our country for a few years and married a thousand women? Or the recurring stories of old migrants in France who came back in coffins to spend one night, one alone, in the vast villa that they had constructed years ago, without ever living in it, at the top of the hill? No! Those stories were only important when they had a connection to a dying person or a child in the grip of fever or afflicted with abscesses.
The village was rather banal, from an outsider’s perspective. An architectural mix between the old colonial houses, occupied by us, and the cinder block extensions, signs of unfinished appropriation. The richest had repainted, the others were content to sit on doorsteps and await the last prayer. The walls were shared, but not the genealogical trees. Each person recognized his tribe and held onto it as to a border of Barbary figs to ward off intruders and hide the women. We also had connections: the bus from the south, which passed through our village twice per day. At dawn, for those setting out on a quest or a long voyage, and at the end of the day, offering a brief spectacle to the loiterers sitting on the side of the road, near city hall and the gas station.
As a teenager, I had diligently charted that island enclave. To the north, the hill, the pivotal hillock, place of origin of our family history, place of sacrifice for dozens of sheep per day. On the eastern side, the vineyards, the asphalt road that leads to the farms of the former colonizers then to the inaccessible mountain, the Christian cemetery, enclosed by a low white wall; to the west, the Bounouila cemetery, dug into a stony hillside, between the fragrant grass and where the sun dies. Arriving in Aboukir, you could see an evergreen forest to the right, where I’d discovered two or three old tombs engraved with French names, the market, and a school, my own. The village slumped to the south, connected to the road leading to the Sahara—which never reached us except by the sky—and joined that same road that came from the north, where the city and the sea eroded each other with rocks and salt. A completely blank ostracon, this village pierced with a minaret, engraved with all my childhood strolls. But, in my head, the map was drawn differently: the meager forest became suffocatingly tropical to the east, in response to the swampy lagoons of the south. And, deliberately dazed, I identified, on the big hill to the north, the gutted husk of my father’s house, washed up on the reefs, the final imprint of my shipwreck. I could plant coconut trees all over, live in a cave with pink walls, and flee the billy goats that the celestial blessing multiplied around my father, or make a useless inventory of dead trees, walk on the sandy bay to revive an ancient story, and recount the adventure of language like a repopulation.
Poll is a parrot I had found in a book whose duty and name I sometimes assumed. A legendary bird who says a single phrase in Robinson Crusoe, but this phrase captures the perfect tragedy, the material limit, the infinite possibility. When I reread this book (often), I stumble upon this enigma, a sort of island within the island. Zabor is a book of a legendary and indispensable inventory, and I have to recount the story of my shipwreck. It will save someone, somewhere.
11
What happened? When did my gift lose steam? I don’t know.
I remember feeling a guilty pleasure when I saw my father follow me discreetly with his gaze for the few seconds he was awake on his bed, stirred by sweat, hollowed by agony. Incapable of speaking but screaming, with all his being, his wild hope and his anger at the indignity inflicted by the illness. I remember being struck by the size of his body, so minuscule—bones prominent under his scraggy skin—dislocated by his prolonged bed rest. He was so thin, so malnourished by his vanity! In the bedroom, the silence accentuated his isolation as if he had been quarantined by all of humanity. This diligent silence we create at the bedside of the sick: contrite but respectful, slightly wary of possible contagion. (“When the prey is bitten by the predator, the entire species or the group divides,” explains the dog. We say we want to let the dead rest in peace. Yeah, right! We abandon him so we can flee more quickly, or so we can avoid attracting the gaze of the dark wanderer.) The bedside lamps in the corners tried unsuccessfully to add a sense of mystery: death is harsh, and has an artificial smell despite the sighs or perfumes. The old man (I remember, there, seated in my pink cave, with my aunt’s coffee, while she clumsily tries to keep from making noise) was dull, blackened by a rage I thought I understood. He was angry at the entire world, not because he was dying but because he was suffering atrociously while others were there, outside, all over the vast universe, insolently showing off their health, unfairly thriving, scattered and vigorous. At one point, his face changed and the anger turned into disdain, perhaps for God. The old man didn’t give up, the others didn’t notice and believed he was at the end of his life, but I saw it. His face changed again, like a stretch of stagnant water, it drooped, his jaw unclenched and his pupils were eclipsed behind the gra
y horizon of his irises. That’s all I could obtain that first time before being chased away like an outcast. So I had to write another story, as quickly as possible. Which one? I had several, some more powerful than others. (The story of my uncle who immigrated to France who, each time he tried to come back to the village, lost the use of his legs, couldn’t find his shoes, or missed his plane. Or the story of my great-grandmother who understood her death was imminent when she discovered a pair of new white shoes outside the room where she’d been sequestered. Or the story of my cousin who lost the ability to speak after watching too many Indian films, every Friday, in the Colisée movie theater in the big city.) Then the old man sank into a sort of obtuse refusal, grimacing. I’ve seen that reaction before, watching over those who come back to life. I think he was questioning why he was the one being sacrificed this time, rather than someone else (everyone thinks that life must be the spectacle of his own eternity, and death’s stage, yes, but someone else’s death, always!), he couldn’t identify the throat-slitter, didn’t really know the butcher (fake laugh). That must be a devastating mystery, no longer being able to grasp things. To twitch without being able to hold or grip anything. To lose the sense of touch, of smell, the order of words and the meaning of gravity. I read in a book that the dead, just after passing away, must first crash into the inexplicable: they can’t understand why, during the funeral, meals are served to everyone except them, and they feel neglected and humiliated by this oversight. They take offense like kids and see death as an affront.
I’m getting off topic. My gift is afraid. Too anticipated, it rebels and withdraws into the lair of my head. Which didn’t work. And neither did the idiotic ultimatum of the eldest of the twelve brothers when, last night, in the shade of the eucalyptus trees (upright sperm whales dripping in the dark), they pushed me to the old man’s bed. “Three hours, and then you get the fuck out of here!” Abdel threatened, his gray plaster face completely still. The same face as the day they pulled him out of the well, at the top of the hill, when he claimed it was I who had pushed him. Standing in a line at the bedroom door, the brotherhood assented, approving the compromise, just before withdrawing into the night and closing the door on the father-son one-on-one. Things will get worse for me if the old man dies, I tell myself. After having been relegated to a well, I will surely be thrown on the street with my notebooks and the dangerous legend of my gift. I’ll end up in a zawiya. In the mosque, as a rug duster. Die of thirst in the forest of Barbary figs that encircles us for miles in every direction. Impossible pedestrian of the great Sahara, a perfect labyrinth with no walls or angles. I can’t even leave the village because I faint when I stray too far from Hadjer and our house.