by Kamel Daoud
I remember that the old man, admirable in the revolt of his heap of bones, stirred slightly at the thirty-ninth page and almost moved his head. I swear. Still enraged, with his brow furrowed. To greet—even still!—the final hours of his life, he raised a rebellious flag and turned his head so as not to grant God the pleasure of meeting his gaze, which was begging for relief. I’ve met people like him in the village, angry at the hand that slowly empties their pockets, rifles through the bag of their body and scatters its shiny obsessions. Nothing can fight that, not even verses. (Death? It inspires faith in spectators and steals it from the dying. I change position because my knees hurt, sitting like this. I leave in a half-hour. No later. Notebooks in hand, I will recount the houses, examine the footsteps, walk around the French cemetery. “Strange, these people who’ve become memories,” concludes my friend the dog. “They are either tombs, or books. Great astronomers lying on their backs.” Perhaps…) The mummy’s struggle to recognize the embalmer or catch his gaze. “What can the cadaver do in the hands of the corpse washer?” a proverb asks us.
The fighter in him had recognized me, I think. It ignited a fire in his eyes before he turned away, pretending to sleep under the stone of his face. Same old story. Bitter. I understood. They had of course tried everything to avoid summoning me. They wanted to deprive me of a victory. According to the rumors, the old man’s head had been corrupted by chaos; and his long story of a man to whom God spoke in his dreams had transformed into stammering and confusion. Recently, the old man was uttering uncontrollable insanities directed at himself, which didn’t help to preserve the memory of his prestige. They had even limited the visits from old friends and from imam Senoussi because, in a strange backlash, the dying man was vehemently ridding himself of all the curse words he had suppressed during all his years of piety and courtesy. Nothing, now, obliged him to keep quiet and conceal his bitterness. Sweet revenge for my grandfather, who had been condemned to silence and reclusion by this eldest son dying today, and who now came back, through the dying man’s mouth, to announce to Aboukir what he thought of everyone. I was astonished, to be honest, caught off guard. I thought my grandfather Hbib was dead forever, after bequeathing to the world nothing but silence, a knife, an empty wallet, and a sewing kit he’d used since my grandmother died. And now he was talking again, but on the other side of an agony that was not his own. I suddenly missed his gray eyes. Perhaps he is the real secret of my gift, the convoluted reason for my anger at the gravedigger who had his fun before taking a bite of him. (He died of tuberculosis, suffocated by his own lungs. The first cadaver I carried in my arms and on my back. When he died, we went through his things, my aunt and I: we found an old pencil, two knives, and a wallet with a photo of him inside, eyes wide open, wild, as if hunted by the light, as if he’d come out of a legend to be exposed. Why? His story is written in a notebook under the definitive title A Moveable Feast for, as a child, I clearly saw an entire city in his eyes when I examined him. And he recounted his fake voyage to France and the details of his imaginary return so wonderfully…)
I looked around the room where they had placed the dying man: plates with the scraps of sweets, proof of old visits. A somber odor of goat: the reciters of the Book, who always wear the same djellabas. They must have been called as a last resort, just after the doctor (I found evidence of him in the pile of medications pushed hastily under the wooden bed) and my stepmother’s first ostentatious migraines. Other details? The outline of a white rectangle on the wall. They had taken down a pious photo, I’m sure. The kind I hate. The rolled-up carpet behind the entryway, in a corner. A bottle of water, probably water from Mecca, from the Zamzam well that saved the lives of Ishmael and his mother when Ibrahim reunited with Sara, his wife. Holy water. Except that death is made of sand. The half brothers had set the stage for my prestige, despite their manifest doubts, before coming to knock on Hadjer the spinster’s door to solicit the moron who was always writing unreadable and yet powerful things in his notebooks. What vengeance! But anyway, I have to set aside my jubilation and vanity.
Get back to the matter at hand.
Typically I ask the name of the dying person. In this case, of course, that wasn’t necessary. I wrote the date at the top left, but with a far-fetched, impossible year, sometime between the strict Gregorian and the Hegira led astray by sandstorms, inaugurated by the name of Ishmael’s mother and not by the flight of the first believers to Medina. The sons of Hadjer, the Mouhadjiroun, and not the “exiled” as the exegeses claim. My calendar’s time is a rare time, between nativity and exile. The tree and the camel, in other words. And I start with three ellipses, almost as a rule, to exorcise fear. In fact, I still have the secret impression that I’m stealing the text from someone else and that reassures me, for paternity and speaking cause me terrible anguish. The paper is still cold under my hand like an empty skin and, when I start, I’m slow as a tattooer. Bad sign, I said to myself, rightly so.
* * *
—
In my notebook, I brood over that humiliating night. Again and again, as a tongue flicks back to the hollow left by a pulled tooth. Because there’s something that escapes me and which is the hint of a refused truth. (In a few hours, it will be dawn. I have to save this life, this specific life, before the muezzin calls and the horizon is ablaze. I lift my head to look at a piece of sky stolen from blind tiles. Behind the door, night must already be searching for a place to cool other parts of the earth. I return to the notebook but it’s silent. Nothing happens. My mind is scattered and I don’t feel the rush that always precedes my trances. Nothing. Just sweat, which is an inconvenience. It’s because the old man worked his acid on my life. For years he’s repeated the same story, mocked me and reduced me to a doubt, pushed me away, laughed at my differences, and he ended up inhibiting my capacity to save his life. Perhaps he didn’t know he was annihilating his only chance at survival. This is my real vengeance: silence.) He will only have had what he deserves. But I know that this is a ruse of my vanity. The truth is that I haven’t managed to save him. Time goes quickly, embraces you like an ally and then suddenly betrays you, there, in front of everyone (“Time is the heart and its hand your blood that circles and circles, with your arms, your neck, and your thoughts”). It was perhaps the vengeance of books I never finished reading, the ones I dropped at the first page like abortions, disfigured by the tactlessness of their authors. Those stories that didn’t manage to seduce me and stayed there, bitter, crouching like widowers, to now come steal my tongue from my mouth. Tiles have started to fall on my head. First one, then all the others like dominoes. I wanted to piss, and to flee. The walls were made of paper and would be ripped by enormous hands, the brothers’ hands. Alif, Lâm, Mîm. Nothing came but the reddish, burnt wind of the Sahara…
I have to overcome this unprecedented breakdown of my gift. I write letters as though on quicksand. The old man, now a drooping fox, has always had this effect on me: as soon as he’s in the vicinity, I feel as though I were laboriously writing my first words in school, stumbling on a new path in tight or too-new shoes. (Then the night sky exploded with the thunder of powerful kicks and the door was knocked down. O Hadjer, protect me, they’re hitting me, they’re chasing me!)
This is how I must finish this notebook that tells the story of the night when I failed to bring my father back to life.
12
Six months ago, a neighbor was sick. She was thirteen years old and her name was Nebbia. Which means “prophetess,” funnily enough. I knew her, she was a staple in my notebooks, described in detail (The Defense, followed by Doctor Brodie’s Report), which preserved her for a long time. A skinny, frenzied child, with big bony knees and a body like a reed, androgynous, sharp, and fast. Sometimes she brought me letters, so that I would read them to her, sent from France by her grandfather’s family or by administrative offices and, at the beginning of the month, she agreed to deliver my missives to her mother (Loose explanation of the wo
rd “ardent”: link between love and temperatures. Short explanation of The Thousand and One Nights and their three major equations—salvation is in the tale; the final celebration is a book; the book saves the palace, the king, and the storyteller. Strategic encounters for a couple in a village where it’s impossible to hide anything. Messages written in a simple language, punctuated with drawings and symbols, hands stained with ink. So that her mother would understand). Little Nebbia listened carefully as I read and then went back home, cautiously, as though she were carrying a goblet of precious water that she was afraid to spill, repeating my messages to herself. Her father had divorced her mother, and the young girl, with a sister who was still a baby and whom I sometimes heard crying, lived on our side street like a cat, with no schools or borders, near her grandparents who’d been wounded by the fate of their spurned daughter. Nebbia was my responsibility because she was somewhat similar to me, her childish spirit moved me, she was the echo of another reclusive woman whose childhood she was reliving. I was amused by her vivacity, which accentuated her emaciated face and her braided red hair, and I loved teasing her about her boy’s games and her harsh manner with the male children who feared her.
They came to summon me when, seated on the doorstep of our house, I was staring attentively at blood of dusk spreading over the clouds (“The night demands a slaughtered sheep, each time, to come show its shiny stones,” muses the dog in my head). The call to the last prayer had just sounded and all the believers were busy absolving themselves. Nebbia’s grandfather took me in his arms and murmured: “God sent you” (“God sent you packing!” corrected the little voice in my head). He was wearing a strange white fez, embroidered with a design depicting a miniature town, which wrapped around his skull and made him look like a giant transporting a city on his head. I followed him wordlessly, heart caught off guard, thinking it was for his wife, already old, on the verge of erasure. At the time, my glory was great but my reputation as a widower without a dead wife made some hesitate to bring me to their spouse or into their home without a witness. I thus accepted promptly, as if to refute the rumors. We climbed three steps, then the old man opened the door. Since childhood I had had a keen sense of smell, and I could identify evils by their odor. This time, a fragrance alerted me because, around here, women awaiting death envelop their bodies in fragrances that mitigate their captivity. I detected the scent of a spurned woman—their daughter, the little one’s mother. Just an olfactive trace, a path on the sand of absence. The beginning of a tale: a decapitated woman. They explained that Nebbia had been ill for a week and they feared the worst. Her grandfather spoke like a powerless god, through verses and supplications.
In a little dark room, I sat down and started to write while the child was suffering, miserable, asphyxiated by a terrible fever. The same odor of sweat, an acidic sting, was floating in the air. The family had stayed behind the door. The voice of a young woman rang out, anxious, the shadow of a persistent perfume. I knew from my aunt that she was named Djemila. Why did that woman occupy my mind, even though my gift restricts me to asceticism, to a battle more consequential than the struggle against lust? I don’t know. Because she was a spurned woman, without a body, a recluse? I myself lived half reclusively in the territory of women, with Hadjer, but that’s likely how I learned that there exists an even greater, more terrible isolation. I was disconcerted: suddenly I felt an unfathomable compassion for this invisible body.
Just behind the door, the poor grandmother was moaning and wringing her hands. She called to God, even though he had already sent me. Strange sensation: I was a sort of necessary monster, born of a law, but also the caricature of a body, a third uncircumcised sex, between women and men. For example, I felt compassion for the other even though they were an abstraction, an absence inscribed in memory. But, confronted by the body and the pain of someone present, I became cold with indifference, distanced myself through the exercise of writing. Asceticism is an anesthesia to save one’s people. Nebbia was like the other saved neighbors: she served my desire to contain a gigantic memory, tolerating not even the tiniest corner of shadow, absolute like a sun, coinciding with a perfect, complete language, stretched from east to west, each word designating something unique and immortal. Next to the little girl, seated and silent while the perfume outlined her mother and the etymology of her name, I was absorbed in this prodigious dream of the double martyr, of the sufferer and the writer linked by the same work. Every invocation is a book waiting to be written.
To save Nebbia, I wrote, soul cold and vigilant, a single paragraph, a sort of ferocious metaphor, wise, naked as an ancient vase. The single-sheet notebook was entitled Musashi, a title stolen from a samurai novel I had never read, and consisted of dialogue. Between the sedentary and the wanderer. Between death and eternity. The stone sharpens the sword, as does desire. But it breaks it too. As does death. Both are necessary. Simple as that. The little girl trembled and, in a murmur, asked for oranges because she was thirsty. I called for her family. At eleven o’clock, the little girl opened her eyes for a moment, examined us one by one, then sank, finally confident, not into death but into a gentle fatigued slumber. They gave me eggs, honey, coffee. The grandfather didn’t know what to say and declared once more that God had sent me. “In the face of death, we are all the same age,” he said as if he were reciting a verse. “But Nebbia is still too young!” he groaned.
I thought of the source of the perfume because, since reading The Thousand and One Nights, I’d had a weakness for female prisoners. The town had disappeared from the skull of the old man with his fez, revealing a hill afflicted with baldness. His eyes watered, and I didn’t know if it was because of his age or his gratitude. Leaving, I hesitated, I searched for a gaze, I could only distinguish a silhouette behind a curtain, slender, with large hips, then the curtain parted and I glimpsed a woman with long black hair, her face seemingly posed on an invisible shoulder, as if detached from her neck by a scarf. That woman’s eyes were strange, fascinating like pits but extinguished, sad. She appeared to look at the world through her lowered lids. Nebbia’s mother was there, but hidden, half incarnated, as though dead. I was struck because I had heard rumors about her, her inability to leave the house, to go to the baths or laugh at weddings. After divorce, a woman slowly immolates herself and becomes the target of a vigilance that dismembers her. She is nothing more than a fire to survey, cunning genitalia, potential shame. When she is spurned, her head is cut off, separated from her body, and she devotes herself to erasing it, to making it hazy and shapeless beneath the fabric, to empty it of its senses and its shivers. When she raised her eyes, I was destabilized by her soliciting, curious gaze. Should I confess? Yes. Suddenly, all my metaphysics were uncertain, susceptible to being refuted, insufficient to save lives. Salvation reclaimed my body. I’m embellishing, but in truth it made me stumble. I remained there examining this face, until the old man finally pushed me gently toward the exit; his thanks were sincere but circumspect.
In the street, the spurned woman was surveilled very closely, as much by her family as by the idling men. That woman didn’t belong to anyone, she sharpened appetites and slander. She was an impasse through which everyone wanted to pass! Body trampled, open, discounted, useless for a wedding, only good for infidelity or hunting. Her fate was a pyre.
I left, I was a bit lost. Then, in my body and in my world, despite my years of writing and devotion, I felt the echo of a past, ignored life. Temptation that I believed impossible—unrealizable because of my choices—or sated by my readings that had brought me something more sophisticated than the desire to marry a woman. Did I want to, in that moment?
* * *
—
There you have it. When I save a life or attenuate the suffering of the sick, that’s how it happens—on the best days. Other times, it can lead me to excruciating hesitations. People think bestowing time is easy. They’re wrong! Sometimes the great question of Evil is evoked, and that of choice.
What to do, in fact, when saving a life amounts to sparing a monster?
I once had to care for an unworthy son, a violent drunkard, who was beating his father and mother. I passed him at dawn, on his way back from a bender, while I was watching over the secret hues and breezes of the early hours. He never looked me in the eyes but nodded his head. He was my age, a face creased by a blind and somber rage. One day, one night, they called on me to save him. He was lying in bed, immobile, masked by bandages, eyes hard and dry searching around him for stones to throw. He had survived a bad motorcycle accident. Two broken legs and more seriously a broken back. His father stared at him, distant, hateful, and overwhelmed. His mother was trembling with fear. She was awaiting the worst, since this outcast would now have to stay at home. Should I save him? I despised him. It was a question of conscience. I had the choice of a god: write or keep silent. Does evil exist? I don’t think so. It’s only a consequence. The effect of a cause. It was written that this son would live cursed and that I had to save him, but all that was to be rewritten. By me. Destiny is a notebook filled with mistakes that we can correct. No, the image is not perfect, I’ll express it differently: we are the words of a great story, recorded somewhere, but we are in a way responsible for our conjugations.