by Kamel Daoud
Three new faces, since yesterday: Nebbia’s aunt, who, six months later, came to thank me (tattooed, enveloped in a haik, fat and benevolent); a tree-trimmer who knocked on our door to offer his services (emaciated, one-eyed, bony as grief); an old aunt come from a distant douar to renew the rumors about Hadj Brahim and discreetly ask questions about my heritage. Three lives. (Hadjer yells that the movie is about to start. I rush to sum up my definitions. My gift is that of a somber man seated at the back of a theater or cinema. It observes: we are all actors paid poorly by the gods, sent back as soon as they get bored or want to change the story and the cast—and then we collapse, fall into holes, die without compensation. Our only resort—ruse of the heavens—is pretending that the play is endless, that the actors and extras are eternal and that the whole universe is this stage, divided by a curtain between the beyond and the here on earth. Which is not true. Which is not TRUE, I shout. Hence the compassion of the somber spectator sitting in the theater that no one notices. Tall, skinny, face hard and handsome, bearing the name Zabor, writing psalms. Rebellious and indignant, he starts to write stories, he rekindles plots, to save the maximum number of actors and extras. He fashions replicas, breathes to mitigate the holes of memory, prolongs the rehearsals. He assigns names, adds text and postpones the end that is on the alert. He manipulates birth dates to perturb death dates. He is alone. He is me.)
13
(A conjecture: read a book starting at the end. The story goes back in time instead of completing it, and at the same time the pages deteriorate, grow old, become fine, fragile. You turn them and they change, paper becomes papyrus, hemp, goatskin, shoulder blades, tree bark, water under your finger, constellations. You turn the pages and the writing itself turns back time: from typography to manuscript, from manuscript to the drop cap of the copyist, then the symbol, the stroke, the scar of cuneiform, the icon, the design, the rupestrian engraving before finishing—restarting—at the index finger of the hand denoting something, the outline of fur, the undulation of a reptile, the movement of eyes, the hoarsest of sighs, the syllable. Once you’ve arrived at the first page, you find yourself seated, poet or hunter, contemplating a forest that resembles a line of ink between the dawn sky and the still-dark earth.)
The bedroom window is wide open onto the sky and the lemon tree. Nothing moves in the sparkling dark blue of the afternoon. The surrounding walls block the horizon but the sky is so big that I fall in each time, hands behind my neck, I imagine the tiny planes with passengers watching us, reconstituting our lives in their dreams. I relish my weightlessness when I wake up at the end of the day. Since I can’t be an astronaut, I make up metaphors. Earlier than normal, Hadjer turned on the television, finally immobile. The sound is imperceptible but enough to ballast me. Poor aunt who, for lack of a prince, married a magic screen that transports her each night. Hadjer’s story is magnificent. Born brown and slender in a country that prefers white skin and women with large hips, she was disgraced from the beginning. Over the years, no one asked for her hand, despite her trips to the baths, her feverish dances at weddings, and the zealous efforts of various matchmakers. She had long hair, beautiful skin, and big eyes, but it wasn’t enough to divert her fate. The youngest of my father’s three sisters, she was nicknamed—and would be called for the rest of her life—“the little one,” Esseghaïra. Now old and on the other side of the dried slope of virginity, she was designated as a “spinster” by the silence of all, refused by men of all ages despite her brother’s fortune. That forged her character. She gained tenacity, willpower, independence. But also bitterness and anger, which diminished her. She came into conflict with all the women of the house up top and the affair was settled when my stepmother demanded that we leave—Hadjer, my grandfather, and me—after the incident with the well, even though I never pushed Abdel, my half brother, I swear. Hadj Brahim appeased his conscience by buying the house down below, which sheltered us somewhat from the sandstorms.
I could sum it up with three bizarre stories. Hbib, my grandfather, renounced speaking little by little, prisoner to his powerlessness, surprised by the amplitude of the silence that surreptitiously invaded him; he stopped drinking bagged milk, eating bread from the baker (which is to say bread not kneaded by his sister), commenting on the world or speaking of God and prayers. Ishmael, which is to say me, lost the use of his senses and started to experience strange panic attacks at dawn, which caused him to scream when faced with mirrors and the reflections he saw in them, and to write feverishly in chaotic languages in his notebooks—before he discovered his gift. As for Hadjer, my aunt, her solution was fabulous: one day, in her head, she married a tall man with a languorous gaze and long eyelashes, angry as a force, virile but gentle because he was an orphan. His name was Amitabh Bachchan, he was Indian (Hindu) and rebellious. Hadjer was secretly wild about him; I realized it because of her groaning when she saw him on the TV screen embarking on quests or hunting his parents’ murderer, whom he’d recognized thanks to a gold bracelet. I was only ten years old and had to translate everything that man said in those films in his various roles, but also what he said to her, to her specifically, when he turned toward the camera and thus toward our village. A strange exercise that opened the door of digression through infidelity to words.
The films were in Hindi, subtitled in French, they unfurled to the wild rhythm of endless, tumultuous diatribes, actors who spoke rapidly, with emphasis and ample gestures, luminous dresses and burning stares. The subtitles came at an impossible speed, which left me too little time to translate, because at that point I knew only a few French words. I filled the holes or lacks with fantasies inspired in me by their facial expressions, grimaces, intonations and cries. In the end, I was translating directly from Hindi, without waiting for the subtitles, embarking on my first betrayal of language but also my first ruse, the fabulous malice of all idioms. Amitabh spoke to me and I transmitted his words to my aunt as we watched reruns of the film on our television (at the time, we could watch broadcasts from dusk to ten o’clock at night, except on the weekend, with one feature film per week, in black and white). Amitabh would come to our house with his frightening haircut and that sultry swaying of his hips, he was part of the family, he walked through the house, distraught, face melancholic or seductive, with his tall and sensual silhouette and his white pants clinging to his body, and Hadjer decided, slowly, that I would inherit his physique as I grew up. The landslide was irreversible. I was destined to end up as a vigilante desired by all, an acrobat, a wild conductor, a dancer, smiling in all circumstances, with strong arms capable of whipping up entire stories. Son and husband mixed secretly in a single body, which allowed her to satisfy her desire for revenge. (As I write this, I cry over her fate. I was her son, but I wish I could have also been her husband, her lover, her father, the missing half of her body, the sweat of the white horse in promising tales, the Hindu actor, the kingdom streaked with omens, the gallop, the hand touching her and the mouth bringing her a new language. Her aging is the cruelest refutation of my gift’s power.)
Our movie nights extended into the next morning, blurring into images projected onto my future, my clothing, my way of walking and my destiny. Beyond this bleak and exciting game, I had another realization, more essential: translatability. After interpreting so many dialogues, I started to adapt them, then replace them, and finally invent them. As a child I discovered the rift between the word and its meaning, the arbitrariness of sound that reduced language to an attempt, not an essence. Amitabh put all his strength into his words, but he seemed trapped in an illusion, secluded behind a system of gutturals and yelps that claimed to say everything when all they did was summarize the conventions of another village in the world. I didn’t understand it so clearly back then, but I had an intuition, even a certitude: language was a lid over the void. An abyss opened softly under my child’s feet when an undeniable truth emerged: there had to be a comprehensive, immense language that summed up all the others, that ser
ved as the matrix of their possible translation from one to the other and with which one could recount every story without them getting lost or erased. A final and definitive writing in which all writings were united at their mouth, downstream. There you have it. The actor, handsome and immortal despite the car fires, gunshots, poisons, and perilous jumps, played a role, but I entrusted him with another part unbeknownst to him. Amitabh was in our home, but I could go over to his home and say things to my aunt that were difficult to express, forbidden or taboo. She ceded to the illusion too, and there were nights when we almost spoke like lovers! Such disgrace, I say to myself today, recalling films like Deewaar or Shollay, and especially Zanjeer. But such fun, too.
From that vaguely sensual and troubling time, I remember most of all the first inkling of my task: I needed a perfect, powerful language, capable of replacing Hindi, of sating my aunt, of organizing the world, of offering a release for the excitement already making my body tremble, and finally of protecting me against my father and his stories. I was nearly eleven years old, I was speaking Arabic fluently in school and reading a bit of French. I needed a revelation. Amitabh stayed at our house in Aboukir for a long time, and one day I gave my aunt a photo of him. She was over forty by then. She looked at the photo with indifference but, at night, she cried, combing her long mane, her last remaining adornment. After that, the actor died from neglect; Hadjer opted instead for Egyptian films that she could understand sometimes without my help.
(Another two days of reprieve. If I don’t write a long story at his bedside to repair his life, Brahim will die and cut off my own. And Djemila will die because she will travel alone backward through her labyrinth.)
14
How did Hadjer manage to bring me back to the house up top after what happened the day before yesterday? She shouted, threatened, promised to slash their cheeks, bellowing her scandal through all the villages of our valley, yelling curses until she went hoarse, her brother couldn’t die without seeing his sister or his son (“half son,” says the dog, mindful of true genealogies). And in a great spectacle of anger, she insinuated that, if her brother did die, she would be a pebble in the shoe of the surviving brothers and sons and would refuse to go to the notary. The eldest, Abdel, somber as the soot of his melancholy, conceded in the end, explaining that he was giving in to her caprice out of respect for his aunt, but that he refused to cross paths with me again. A neighboring family on the hill intervened in my favor, arguing that, even if I failed to revive the dead, I wasn’t killing anyone with my notebooks. Two neighbors escorted me up—it was just yesterday, the day after my first visit. It wasn’t at night, this second attempt: I had to break with my routine and follow Hadjer and my bodyguards at around one in the afternoon, under an odious sun that burned my neck and charred the ancestors in my head. I was sweating, nameless dogs followed us at our arrival, up to the threshold of the large portrait of the house up top.
In the brightness of the day, the house revealed great filth, scraps of meals eaten in the courtyard, intimate laundry lying about. The vine seemed small compared to the nocturnal tricks of the foliage the last time I’d seen it. No one dared cross my path, except for the children, whose gazes revealed what the adults thought of me and my aunt. In the room, the shade was cool but the odor still acidic. The old man had become a fistful of flesh in the rumpled hand of the sheet. The storks of death were there, in the large invisible nest of its tomb. I drank the coffee that was offered and Hadjer sat down on the doorstep, my guardian. She started speaking, to erect a sort of wall. She talked about everything: names, resentments, old stories, her mother’s names, malformed verses. Her voice got louder and then died back down, became a murmur, a discreet hourglass. She had to keep going for as long as it took me to revive the old man.
I generally begin by searching for a connection between me and the client whose body is withering a little too quickly and whose breath I have to reignite as one relights a fire. The dying person responds with a slight quiver, sometimes lifts an eyelid heavy as a stone and, beyond the crowd of his ancestors, recognizes me or tries to recognize me. It’s a troubling moment, my throat knots. And, at the end of the cycle, the dying person always responds with either odious gratitude or jealousy. I’m not an idiot, in this realm of mute truths they inevitably realize the singularity of my gift. Sometimes, gratitude morphs into hatred. Why? The debt to pay is immense. The man understands that the rest of his life, his breathing, and the hour of his death, depend on me, on my diligence and the consistency of my tense conjugations and the precision of my adverbs. All I’d have to do is stop writing and he’d die; as long as I’m hunched over my notebooks, he survives. Somewhat. Or entirely. He might even recover full health if I write faster, if I stop eating, drinking, if I turn the pages at the wild speed of my passion. Often illiterate, my patients start to hope for endless notebooks, they evaluate them, counting the pages, and rush to procure me more notebooks, even thicker, in the stores of the big city, along with ink and pens. In the corner of my boxing ring, their family members shoo away the flies around me, wipe my sweaty forehead.
This time, the old man who died was not really a stranger to me—or was absolutely. He knew, and I knew. That made him angry like a shameful destitution. He knew from his panicked memory that I could take my vengeance for all those years he had tried to belittle me with his bleak stories from before Independence and crush me with the epic saga of the sheep that fell from the sky to take my place in his heart. That was the risk of the trade. That I might mix my affairs with my magic herbs.
In the bedroom hung a musty odor, I could almost smell the stench of decomposition flowing under his skin. The fragrance of death is not as terrible as its cry, but it is odious. My notebooks often responded to this by exhaling an aroma of wet clay that only I could smell—a phenomenon recalling the impossible disintegration of the bodies of the three saints who gave their blessing to our village. The Prophet, they say, experienced the same miracle: his body remained unchanged and his death was a perfume that moved to a new vial, from body to tomb. I often wondered, as a child, why no one went to dig him up, either to verify the legend or to boost that religion’s miracle. At the time, I believed impiety should be vanquished like an electricity outage. But perhaps what was unchangeable was in fact the Holy Book, the body of work rather than the body, and perhaps we had to recount things in this way to set pilgrims on the path of reflection and miracle. Perhaps this prophet had written or heard a book so powerful that he could no longer decompose after death and would carry on endlessly, over the entire earth, made solid and immutable by the book’s chains of transmission and the reciters’ dissemination. I don’t know. He had surely discovered this miracle long before anyone else, in his cave.
* * *
—
Protected by my care, my school notebooks were always chosen according to the number of pages but also the pattern of the lines, the texture of the paper—which had to be thick, rasping, almost coarse in order to better absorb the ink and consecrate the gesture of the hand moving over it. It was important to write well but also to elevate calligraphy like a lofty song, a preliminary drawing of the territory as a prerequisite to any resurrection. Without discipline, the ink and the letters clouded again with birds, bushes, vermicelli between my aunt’s fingers, snakes, palm trees, the Nile, beaks, horns. The alphabet collapsed, to my anguish, into the ancient bestiary it had come from: the S of Sîn was the snake, the B of Ba’ was born of the hearth, the A of Alif with the silhouette of a vulture perched in a dead tree or the gaze of the piercing eye, the T of Ta’ was the image of the cooking pot, and so on and so forth, provoking my panic. I had to fight endlessly against the temptation of the pictogram and be blind to the letter’s ancestors or to its persistent etymology to keep nothing in my mind but its immediate usage and my concern for salvation. The ritual I practice is born of a desire for precision, because I had admired the manners of the reciters of the Holy Book with whom I spent
my adolescent years (O sidi Khloufi, our master of the Holy Book, who always regarded me with suspicion). I learned from this, despite myself, that the outline of the word is as important as its meaning, like the caress during a proclamation of love, or the contour of the lip to calibrate a kiss.
In those idiotic, fervent years, I realized that the act of tirelessly rewriting verses on the tablet, the curve of the ink released in the upstroke, the care brought to the thickness of the symbol as it blooms, are already an apposition of hands on a body, the start of reparation through palpation. If writing comes from the hand, we can move from its outline to the palm and from the palm to the heart or the illness. It was the implicit law of this profession practiced by the talibs and the reciters of the Holy Book trying to wrest from oblivion the exact translation of the word of God as it had been revealed to the Prophet. Which is to say that I always experienced clumsy writing as a troubling stain, something like a betrayal or an epidemic.
In that room with the leprous walls, my hands trembled before I even grasped the first pen with black ink. I almost spilled the cup of cold coffee they had served me and I didn’t dare meet the gaze of the old man who had destroyed my bones for so long. Yes, I had a desire for vengeance or murder, I admit it. So to tempt the devil, who is a rumor, I decided to do nothing, as he had wanted to do nothing for Djemila, or for my mother. I suspended my gesture and time. Behind the door that they had barely repaired, I could hear Hadjer’s voice, indistinct but familiar like the old scarf she used to wrap around my head to soothe my migraines.