by Kamel Daoud
The truth is that I felt cold, indifferent, incapable of love or tenderness. The old man, his breathing painful, seemed to be climbing a slope. From time to time, his feet jolted abruptly as if he’d missed a step or tripped over a pebble. He was already half cadaver, his index finger pointed toward the sky. The other half was trying to extract itself from the tomb with the single hand and the fourth of a leg that were still alive. An insect on the bark of a eucalyptus tree. Gnawed by illness, his flesh no longer held any temptation for death, that ancient animal who so loves the aromas and cracks of bones nourished with greasy marrow.
In my first notebook, I described his limbs, so scrawny under the sheet, like branches covered with cloth. He had clearly been suffering for months, but that left me cold and distant like an asteroid. His cancer had been slow, patient in its devouring, and now it was sucking his bones, sated. On the altar of God, the debris of the ceremony that had gone on for months: a pile of useless medications, honey deemed miraculous by Tradition, a chamber pot of a dubious white, numerous bottles of mineral water, and the fruit that visitors kept bringing him when only his eyes could still bite into them. (“The fall is initiated by a fruit and the departure by a raven!” explains my dog.) The old man would die in turmoil if I couldn’t find a story to write.
I tried to focus on making an inventory of the objects in the room, as we do when we’re invited into an unfamiliar home and the host excuses himself to serve the coffee. A horrid carpet, Koranic illustrations (replaced after my first visit), and the armoire from his wedding, the second one of course, when he married the spouse who was there, on the other side of the wall, worried about her fate or vaguely happy at the idea of being free. Vile plastic flowers and fabrics covering the orange and mauve mattresses intended for visitors. Not a composition of colors: a nausea. And the stench of a fermenting body that the earth would soon drink. In his solitude, the man sometimes opened an enormous eye that seemed to drift on its own above black water, then closed it again, vanquished. I looked at my hands. Strangely, they had an almost autonomous life: free to grab on to what didn’t exist or to rifle through the tapestries of phantoms, they moved, gripped, crocheted, pointed at an invisible being or piled up denials with the same finger that had become a tiny god at the end of the prayer, establishing a fascinating dialogue between the appendix and the cloudy sky that I would be smart to translate into my awaiting notebooks.
Which chattering parliament would the sufferer have to face in the guise of a prerequisite to his final hour? I had convictions: death is a quarrel against memory. I speak from experience, and because my intuition is ferocious as a tooth. I don’t believe we die in solitude, as is said in sad songs and books, but in the heap of dense crowds, jostling our elbows to forge our path, as when we try to find our shoes leaving the mosque. I’m sure that death attracts a crowd: the living family members, the dead who approach with curiosity. On one side, silence, on the other, the hubbub of a hammam. Right? I imagined the beyond as a stampede where millions of people with different beliefs pile up and cross paths. Sometimes, after the hardship, people have asked me to remain at their side so they can dictate their memoirs to me, for “O, glory to Allah, I’ve finally understood!” But this desire runs dry and at first their regained health brings embarrassment (when the miracle survivor crosses me again in the street), then to that bitter oblivion I’ve already mentioned. In the end, the man prefers the mosque to shaking my hand. Those who have money leave for Mecca to wash their bones of my memory. As for the women, I never see them again, or only after they’ve lost their last teeth.
This time, the man before my eyes was not yet in the clear. What could I do? I had to scribble, faster, surmounting the scattering of my mind and of the alphabet. Outside, Hadjer was going up against a dozen women: she was evoking her rights as the sister of the dying man, her share of the inheritance, the glory of her father who had become mute and then saintly before he wound up a cadaver exuding the perfume of paradise; she was patiently explaining that my refusal to eat meat and my fainting at the sight of blood were proof of my purity and not of my curse.
Then suddenly, I started to write. My salvation depended on it.
15
(In a few hours, my half brothers will return; time is their dog who searches for my footprints and barks at me. They agreed to leave me at Hadj Brahim’s bedside for half the day, to give me—give him—a chance. Sounds of dishes remind me that I’m hungry and that the members of this stingy household haven’t served me a thing. I slept very little and I’m not used to being awake during the day. It makes me nauseous. Too much noise. I feel like I’m in a train station or a hammam. I had forgotten just how glaring the sun was, after so many years of nocturnal vigils.)
We always start with ellipses, as if to signal that we are resuming an old story interrupted by dawn. Before starting the song or the recitation, the oracles and poets from before the Prophet let out a series of cries, noble jabbering that turns into letters of the alphabet. Alif/Lâm/Mîm. The famous Noun. The mysterious Sâd and the evocative Taha. That untamed abecedarium rattled like a necklace of bones, intended to draw attention as much as to show the cracks in language, the Holy Book reveals this through its Meccan surahs, created when the Prophet had to distinguish himself from poets and surpass their prestige in the eyes of the tribes of that time. I thought it was a whim when I discovered this custom, but I understood later that it was actually an invocation to exorcise silence, or witness the very place of the birth and the limit of language. The letters had been thrown to the sky like dice, to break with routine and clear the way for renovation. Through the god or the poet. They were the verbose opposite slope of a great silence, indifferent and savage.
I use these three periods in my own way, like breadcrumbs in the forest, white pebbles, another man’s footprints on my deserted island. I can multiply metaphors ad infinitum but I could never express the relief they bring me each time, hooks in the heart of the night, artifices to conjure fate, before writing takes me like a cadence. I was sharing breath with the dying man, finding his story again within his defeat and restoring his need to live. Amusing, right? It was a Friday when I read my first book cover to cover. (“Faster!” whispers an annoyed shadow. A black face contrasts with the bright light of the outside through the half-open door. Hadjer has interrupted her story to speak to me for a moment. “Faster! They’re going to get in, those bastards.”)
* * *
—
The village is surrounded by about twenty douars where endogenous marriages guarantee the same old name for all and assure that the first names of the dying are transmitted to newborns. The familial hill is the site of the shipwreck. That’s where one of my ancestors set foot, the father of the first tribe that settled on this land, outside the village, at the time of the colonizers, and maintained the fear of descending the slope, the desire to live discreetly behind the world, and the perfunctory mannerisms of secondary characters. Our house down below, in the village, belonged to a Frenchman whose name I never knew. It’s an old building with three rooms, a ceiling, a kitchen, and a “four-season” lemon tree with heavy, neglected fruit.
I go back there, to that house, at dawn. I sleep nearly all day, to avoid meeting people my age preparing for their weddings with smiles and lewd innuendos, seeking the best carpenter to make the nuptial bed and the wedding armoire. I don’t work but, sometimes, families that have solicited me on an uncertain night for a dying loved one have brought us eggs, vegetables, leftover crops, or even coffee, sugar, sodas. Depending on their degree of gratitude. My aunt Hadjer hesitated at first, then she decided to accept these offerings that she came to consider a right, maybe even an homage spilling over onto her, a reparation for her family’s scorn. In the courtyard, I would listen to the long debates between her and her rivals or imaginary neighbors; she would use reason and negotiate her good faith with invisible beings, as she plucked the chicken offering or washed the potatoes left b
y my father in a crate on the doorstep.
I remember my grandfather sitting in the sun, immobile, all covered up, his greenish eyes noting everything in a vast imaginary notebook—until he died drowned in the blood of his lungs. Hadjer’s dark skin gleamed with the effort of cooking, exuded a sweat that made her desirable. Those were the best moments of the summer, the endless season in my narrative. The most beautiful part of her story was the list of supposed suitors who had asked for her hand and who, one after the other, had succumbed to a fatality. I loved when she described the nice car, the virtue of the handsome stranger, the illness that would later ravage him, and she would list parallels between him and her Indian actor. There were about thirty of them: distanced by a brother, led astray by a future stepmother, driven away by a bad-mouthing cousin, discouraged by the barriers of the Barbary figs, given the wrong address to our house by a malicious neighbor, etc. At thirty, she was already, in our universe, too old to seduce or bear children. So she stayed there, peeling potatoes, taking care of my grandfather and me and watching Indian films.
The poor woman, I understood early on, had no role, between the bride she was not yet, the old stepmother she would never be, the prostitute she couldn’t imagine being, and the young spinster still waiting for someone to come knock on her door. We were alike, that’s why she decided, I think, to keep me as one sharpens a knife, as one fashions a slingshot, or perhaps as one raises a son. I loved her and I made sure to populate her world by translating as many films as possible. When I was a child, she would hit me hard when she got angry; I knew it wasn’t out of hate or a lack of love, but because she had been hurt by the village. Like me, she avoided the outside world, the bath at the end of the week, the weddings of others, the meetings between women, or the matchmakers who made fun of her and her withered hope. (“Yes, that’s my son. He was given to me by God, and not by an idiot with empty pants,” yells my aunt, sitting in front of the dying man’s bedroom door.) I was her son in the disorder of dead leaves fallen from the genealogical tree. She never ceded to the temptation of letting death in, except for the day when she waited for a suitor who never came.
I remember that day like a bad night: two of my aunts had been there since the morning, Hadjer had suffered through the ritual of the bath, the clay exfoliation, the waxing, her hair had been braided, and she’d tried on dresses. The house smelled like sugar, the vanilla of cakes, and we had dressed my grandfather in a lovely djellaba and placed him in a corner of the courtyard. The marriage proposal is a rite for women which is then validated by men. The first negotiations are among women. That day, the suitor’s family had to come scrutinize my aunt’s body, evaluate her health, examine the whiteness of her skin, and determine her real age. We had practiced everything, including my discretion. The novelty was exciting to me at first. But then, wandering through the courtyard, watching my grandfather and counting the leaves of the lemon tree, I vaguely understood that it posed a vital threat to me. Another of my aunts had been telling me since the day before that I shouldn’t worry: at worst, I would go live with her in the douar, to the east of the village, and she would raise me as her son. I understood then that the crumbling of my universe was possible, perhaps even imminent. The memory of the wind came back to me and lifted the flaps of my grandfather’s djellaba. Dust filled my mouth and worry coursed through me. I had been an idiot fooled by sweets. Who saved me? A beggar, perhaps. Or a cunning child who looked like me, who scattered the visitors telling them another address and watched them grow distant with their baskets. Or a rumor about Hadjer’s age. In any event, my aunt and her sisters waited the entire afternoon, in vain. The most painful moment was when her sisters departed: they had to find a pretext to leave without trampling on Hadjer’s adorned body. She said nothing that day, nor the next, nor the next. She stayed riveted to the television, didn’t move even when there was nothing on the screen but wild agitated ants in black-and-white. She started eating raw lemons, excessively salting our dishes, and her skin dulled. It would take her years to forget that affront and she shut herself away even deeper inside our house, which became a body for the both of us.
* * *
—
She’s the one who insisted that I go to school; she’s the one who drove me down chaotic paths toward this gift she only half believed in, I think. When I was five years old, she dressed me in a black apron, combed my hair with a painful vigor, sprayed me with bland perfume and explained to me that I had to cut across seven side streets to the west, before crossing “the street for cars.” On the first day, she was there, enveloped in her haik, eyes burning with pride and something like anger to dissuade slander. She took me by the hand until the eighth side street and remained planted there following me with her gaze while I thrust myself into a suffocating, dusty universe, swarming with commotion and the stamping of the other village children led as a group toward the free school. What did she feel? Fear, certainly. Time took my hand in her place, leaving a shadow and a rock in her stomach. I was the only man who had sought out her touch, sometimes, on stormy nights, I knew. I remember the gleaming golden buckle that decorated my new shoes and shone in cadence with my steps, in the light of the hot September day. I also have a distinct memory of the other kids’ attitudes toward me, their curiosity and distance. I was the son of Hadj Brahim, a rich and respected butcher who sold the meat they were only allowed to eat once per week, on Friday, with the couscous. The illusion of esteem broke a few days later when I heard one of the children, the most brazen, imitate a bleating goat. That made the group laugh, and their violence was unleashed. Soon after, I concluded that school was not at all enjoyable.
I realized my difference there. I learned things quickly, with a facility that surprised even me and which, I think, was explained by my fear of being bored. My schoolmaster, Mr. Safi, half bald, alert and often skipping about despite his enormous stomach, was amused by my unenthusiastic intelligence, but he worried about my uncommunicative nature. I wasn’t sad, just distant, indifferent. What might have passed at first glance for a sharp mind was soon revealed to his adult eyes to be a deception on my part to remain far, elsewhere, by refusing to join the group. Or the sign of a graver illness destroying my mind much more than my body. And on top of it was my nasally voice, the bleating that dissuaded him from asking me questions in public to avoid the other students bursting out laughing. My timbre was a stigma but also a nice excuse to consider my silence as a compromise agreed upon by everyone. No one seemed able to tolerate this tremolo that struck the heart like the bleating of a goat and transformed the beautiful words flitting around my head into painful croaks. (Could Poll have rid himself of it, without jeopardizing his gift? There’s nothing more horrible than the squawking of parrots, as we all know.) They left me sitting alone at the table in the back and they granted me my silence as a right and a duty. A recluse, I was brilliant but with the nonchalance and indifference that neutralized the admiration of others and kept them distant, wary, or even disgusted. My distinction was seen as a handicap and the other schoolchildren sometimes opted for meanness, other times for quarantine. But what escaped my schoolmaster as well as the agitated kids of my generation was that it was a godsend for me: I learned more quickly and, although I was barely six years old, I was already stumbling over the unbelievable convention of writing and the major conceit of language!
It was October, I think the beginning of the afternoon. I remember a feeling of suffocating, of boredom, and a persistent desire to go back home to watch the lizards on the whitewashed wall of the courtyard. The shack that served as our classroom heated the air and made the teacher’s head sweat. As he inspected our rows, I traced a vertical line in mauve ink, blotting paper under my hand. The wet tip of the quill squeaked against the paper then stopped. Above the tree, I drew a curve. We had to retrace the same stroke, over and over, until we could control it between the fine lines of the notebook. To draw what? At that age, I hadn’t yet grasped the connection between
the ink and the scattering of the world. How writing ropes everything together. I learned to write through obedience, without accessing the forbidden. Writing, the alphabet, remained limited to the framework of repetitive exercise, Hadjer’s universe stayed in its corner, and I was there, mute, incapable of overcoming my bleating voice. Through the classroom window, I could see a distant fig tree that looked like an old man trying to scale a wall and, closer, two eternally green weeping willows, cascading. The wind kicked up dust in the playground and I was missing a lot of words, including the ones that could have summoned my mother’s face, now hazy. It formed a knot in my throat that made me cry. The teacher looked at me for a long time, hesitated, then decided to send me home before the end of class. I remember saying nothing to my aunt that day, I rewrote the few letters I’d practiced relentlessly, entangling them like twine, stretching them until they overflowed the pages, linking them to ink stains. Savage once more in the house, I saw a strange liberty in them, the possibilities of composition. Taha, or Alif/Lâm/Mîm. Those were my first steps on the island. (I turn the last page; I still have three notebooks left of seven, it’s like my hand is holding vibrating reins and Hadjer is an ancient warrior.)
A week later, I discovered, at the same time as my schoolmaster, that I had learned to read long before the other schoolchildren. Seamlessly, because each night I devoted myself to the exercise, mingling the letters like jacks. A sudden order emerged, and my bleating voice stopped bleating, in my head, at the very moment when I learned to decipher the first words. A deceptive recovery for, as soon as I closed the textbook, I fell back under the sheep’s sonorous reign. It was then that, in an almost sickly haste, I started to hunt for words and utensils, the smallest objects came alive, were revived, inventoried: I just had to know how to write them to bring them back to my attention. O inaugural miracle! I was looking at a dark new world, like the forest at the entrance to the village. I felt my new dignity as firmly as if they had bought me new clothes. My joy was nearly complete, but it was very quickly ruined by an unexpected and troubling result: compared to the language of school, Hadjer’s language, which had been my language since birth, proved insufficient, meager, like a sick person whose hands couldn’t grasp objects or point at faraway or dimly lit things without trembling. I realized this over the course of my education. When I understood, I felt surprise (especially because no one could explain it to me), then scorn, and finally anger. (“You ate my brother’s sheep, and today you eat his body and his eyes!” yells my aunt, as a diversion I suppose, to draw their attention, like a lightning rod.) I don’t know what fallacious reasons I used to conclude that my illness and sadness, which had endured for so long, didn’t stem from a character flaw, or from my mother’s death, or from my bleating voice, but from a reclusive language, ignored by books and school, hidden and forbidden. Like my aunt. Abruptly illuminated by that revelation, the house down below seemed dirty, drab, vulgar. It was the island of desolation, the site of my shipwreck, bodies swollen on the sand, the beached boat of my memory, the darkness of the flora still silent behind the lines of writing. The discovery of the miserable gap between Hadjer’s language, mixed and hybrid, and the language of school, evolved into bitterness against my own world, and I became a mean child at home, and cowardly outside.