by Kamel Daoud
We walked between the bushes through the yellow, fragrant flowers while I watched over the dogs in the distance. There were poor houses, tiled roofs, the ruins of old farms behind the fig trees. I had the marvelous impression that I was at the end of the world, because there was no more road, only a path through uncharted land. The green-and-white mausoleum was astonishingly small, modest, with an immaculate flag raised on its roof, a small courtyard, and low walls repainted with lime wash. The entrance was blocked by the other white haiks of women who were waiting, seated in a group or already inside a sort of antechamber. They had taken off their shoes and piled them in a jumble, as at the entrance of a mosque before the prayer. That’s where they had us wait, each of us inhabited by our own evil. The contrast between the light of day and the darkness inside blinded me like a faint. Little by little, I distinguished shadows and giant candles that gave life to the rugs and the dark green paint on the walls. There was a pervasive odor of must and incense; no one spoke. Which worried me because, outside, only a few yards away, there were animated conversations and the bushes in the fields rustled in the gentle wind. The women were quiet here, out of fear or respect, while outside people competed within the hierarchy of pain or of the “evil eye” and told long stories about jealous rivals. They spoke of desperate treks before being shown the right way to the mausoleum. Some mentioned miracles.
Once more I placed my head, crushed by a migraine, on Hadjer’s thighs and the darkness withdrew into the room, transformed into gray nuances and then into sad faces and dresses. There were women of all ages but no children, I was the only one. I was taboo, searching for something to attach my curiosity to, while my aunt nodded her head in response to an intimate soliloquy. At the end of a sort of alcove, the face of an old woman was floating in the halo of a white veil. Her eyes stared at me for a long time when I noticed her with unease. They were minuscule and harsh, through the interlaced, tightly squeezed tattoos that devoured her like a book or a scribble. Suddenly, she started to chew, exaggerating the movement of her dry lips, scrutinizing me avidly. That frightened me and I started to groan, squeezing my aunt’s knees until she noticed and hid me under her veil. I followed their duel, eyelids shut tight, between my aunt invoking the names of God recited on loop and the sound of the old woman’s chewing. It wasn’t the first time I had seen tattoos but there, in the shadows, they seemed alive, feeding on the flesh of their hostage, strong as tree branches and capable of spreading to other bodies, binding them in a grip to impose the indecipherable. It was at once monstrous and alluring. Suddenly, the old woman yelled as if they had stolen something from her and they quickly dragged her away while she tried to resist with her skinny uncovered legs. I heard the sound of a struggle and then the silence returned, as though summoned to erase the incident. I almost cried with fear in the stifling stench, under the black, faded rugs of my squeezed eyelids. The wait seemed to drag on even longer amid Hadjer’s strict silence; she seemed in a hurry to leave this place, but they summoned us before the end of the day.
22
An old woman, slightly haughty, brought us into a dark room that reeked strongly of the old dead smell of confinement and the specific odor of soaking clay, and she stayed there, planted and immobile like an abandoned tool. Then I saw a young man, sitting cross-legged, smiling in the darkness—seductive in his excess of benevolence. I had grown up in a house where faces were harsh, bountiful smiles hadn’t been anything but deceptive masks. I was wary as a result. The talib, wearing a tidy, golden turban and a white djellaba, presided over his kingdom in the shadow of God. He didn’t even look at me, but was intensely interested in my aunt, whose curves he examined rapidly. Hadjer’s eyes possessed a strange gleam of respect but also a merchant’s vigilance, fearful of being tricked. The consultation cost money, and Hadj Brahim gave us only a little, at least in cash.
My aunt didn’t wait to be invited to speak, she threw herself at the reciter, kissed his hand, and whispered the list of my ills and the signs proving that I was possessed. I had never seen her so loquacious, describing my fits in detail and everything else that, according to her, proved the adversity of fate, the evil eye, or the harassment of evil spirits that lived in the wastewater, according to my family’s beliefs. Her story stretched on, strayed into my birth and the death of my mother, went back to the time of the colonizers, then stopped in the vast sea of the evils of all creation. As she spoke, I scrutinized the dark room tinged with green, decorated with verses sewn onto various fabrics. Next to the talib, I saw a bowl of ink, the tablets for the recitations of disciples, and wet clay, as well as sharpened reeds to write the word. It was the scent of burnt hair perhaps, or wool reduced to cinders to make the ink, that worried me for a moment. Hadjer was still whispering, narrating my caprices as a strict vegetarian, the slaughters of sheep I had witnessed, and how the sight of blood always made me faint. The beauty of the fabrics that hung on the walls, depicting verses I couldn’t comprehend despite my mastery of the alphabet, enthralled me; I touched them with my fingertips and followed them to the end of the room where I almost bumped into the woman who had brought us in. The man listened with the necessary care to justify his fees, signaled for me to approach, and when he bent toward me, his face made me even more uneasy.
It was a face that hesitated between genders, smooth and hairless like that of a woman but with a male grin exuding lechery from behind a fake cheerfulness. He had the fine mustache of his age, but rosy cheeks that were embarrassingly sensual. Today I can decipher, through memory, the sensual upstrokes and downstrokes of his ink on his plump body and the rigidity of the stylus stemming from the virility he concealed behind his gift. The look he gave my aunt was not innocent, but he had understood that any attempt in that direction would be in vain. I curled up next to her as she waited, silent now and seemingly paralyzed. A hand touched my hair—I closed my tired eyes—then the slow, low voice of the talib brought me back, reciting the Holy Book at an insane speed, monotone, repeating the verses and animating them with enchanting vocal effects. The art of the reciter, which I had loved since childhood when I’d witnessed it during burials or other important rituals. I decided to half open my eyes and I saw this person who was neither woman nor man, honeyed and cunning, grasp a few sheets of paper and a reed pen. He scribbled for a long time, in the chiaroscuro that made his laughing eyes shine, before folding several small talismans, hermetic “books” I was forbidden to read, that we had to use according to strict instructions given to my aunt. I had to keep seven books on my body, stuck to my skin, in my bag, and under my pillow. The other three had to be steeped in a combination of oil, honey, and thyme, so that the ink would dissolve in a mixture I was to drink on an empty stomach, Friday morning, facing east. “He’s been struck by the evil eye and bitten by the spirit of a night dog!” he concluded. His smile made me even more afraid when he looked at me for the final time, as if he’d guessed the origin of my terror of waking to the world. Still today, I remember his strange knowing gaze and I struggle to interpret its meaning. Had he guessed the source of my misfortune? That asexual being, who was like a skilled juggler between two reigns or two genders, obsessed me like a stolen key. My aunt took the “books” in one hand and her nephew with the trembling knees in the other and never again did we return to that place, which had been as disconcerting for her as it had been for me. (I turn another page of the blue notebook and I continue. When I lift my eyes, it takes me a few seconds to find my bearings and the name of this place. As when we wake up in a strange house. It’s already night. I’m on guard duty. I don’t know whether to take a walk to bury my notebooks, or smoke in the courtyard. That very indecision is a joy in itself. I decide to head for the hill, walk among the eucalyptus trees.)
23
The book talismans fascinated me, hanging from my neck like silent bells, keeping watch from under my pillow to ward off nightmares and imaginary animals, hidden in my schoolbag or shirt pockets, like spies. I wasn’t ever s
upposed to take them off except for a rare bath or to go to the toilet because it’s forbidden to bring the word of God in there. Hadjer made me drink the mixture three times, following the talib’s instructions—a broken key had also been slid under the sole of my foot while I swallowed the liquid, as he had advised. My grandfather, lying on his favorite lambskin in the kitchen, watched this ritual. He had lost his appetite weeks ago and spent his time undoing the seams on his mattress or trying to hurt his face. Hadjer’s gestures caught his attention for a moment before he turned his back to her. The beverage was sweet and heavy. After I swallowed the mixture, I let myself fall into a long reverie. I was trying to understand the link between the talib’s writing and the power he invoked, his way of penetrating deep into the body to affect even the dark blood inside.
How could writing command spirits? That belief was profoundly instilled in the village, where calligraphy wasn’t considered merely a game of curves and inflection of form, it also depended on a choice of scents, tastes, touch. Writing was legible but not only that: it had an odor, a material, a sound under its reed pen. People believed this with certitude, decomposing and recomposing the finished Holy Book, with its 6,236 verses and its 323,670 character count, so that it could respond to singular cases, to daily life and every time period. A sort of combinatorial art that neutralized the finitude of the book through the art of recomposing each letter, word, or verse, depending on the circumstances. The reciters, the sorcerers, or the heretics were like jugglers of the invisible, specialists of the interpretation that prolonged the book beyond its last impossible page.
Alone in my room, the next day, I set about writing letters in a false disorder, sticking them together absurdly to study them attentively like the cries of unknown animals. I searched for a copy of the Holy Book in our house but couldn’t find one, and God saved me from blasphemy. I had wanted to compare the Book’s verses to mine. As a child I understood perfectly that the chaos of letters it created could lead to a meaning it would be incapable of emanating. Did the “books” attached to my life change something about my panic attacks and chase off the threats of the night? I’m not sure. Perhaps simply by provoking my curiosity, they diverted my attention. I woke up without night terrors but with the sensation of wearing a necklace of stones that I carefully caressed each morning. The books didn’t escape the mean attention of the other schoolchildren, they spared me the stone throwing and the usual insults. In the village, the children knew the legends evoking the power of the reciters and the punishment reserved for skeptics or the insolent.
The idea germinated in my head, fantastic and dangerous, like a reverie: I saw myself crossing the threshold of the forbidden, unfolding the little “books” hanging from my body, and being immediately set ablaze by God or one of his angels, devoured by tattooed old women or thrown into the world with a shout that would never end. I decided to abstain, but bad ideas have the power to linger, until the moment you find yourself alone in a room, on a Friday, at the hour of the siesta. So I took one of those “books,” sewn into a small green fabric sachet, a little dirty from the dust and my sweat, and, hands trembling, I opened it to try to read it, to see how such tiny words written with a special reed pen dipped in a mixture of water, gum arabic, and the charcoal of kindling or burnt wool could heal. “Noun! By the pen and what they write,” says the Holy Book. The reed shaped like a stylus, plunged into the ink of the oldest ocean, Noun. The image fascinated me when I learned the stylus surah years later, but at that age I didn’t know. I just wanted to unfold one page of this first book, the quarto which, according to Tradition, contained the entire Book. To understand the link between power, sovereignty, and the upstroke. To discover how God had filled the void between things and me and why the fear had disappeared, turned to shadow then a vague gray sigh. And all I could read of it was a wild writing, chaotic, dense like a secret fleece, tangled with signs, numbers, and exclamations, punctuated with crude stars and celestial bodies, incomprehensible like a constellated sky. A deceptive trick? Years later, I would come upon the same script and understand that, to express the essential, writing couldn’t be restricted to a finite alphabet and had to utilize the blanks between words and in the margins of the page.
24
Did Brahim half open his eyes? Did he groan, with no words in his well? It obsesses me. The night I fled—it was only the day before yesterday—is still chaotic and painful in my memory. I’m sure I missed a detail of the ritual, violated an ancient rule. But which one? Of course, I hesitated, my writing stumbled, spun in circles, and searched, muzzle to the floor, for the trace of a path. But that doesn’t explain my powerlessness. There, near the switched-off TV, I brusquely remember that, on the threshold of Hadj Brahim’s house, as I was fleeing, distraught, that first night, someone threw a fistful of coins at my back yelling at me to pick them up and never return because that was all the inheritance I’d ever get. Then I walked quickly, head lowered, but calmly, on the path that leads back down to the village; I crossed the priors rushing to the mosque, who avoided my gaze as if I were a Christian loitering on their land. No one greeted me and I filled my lungs with air. The night had penetrated my chest like cold water and I felt cleansed. “By the star when it wanes,” swears the Holy Book in my head. I adore the descriptions in the Book, when it speaks of stars like a calendar of eternity. It’s always a marvelous tête-à-tête between disbelief and infinity. A god declares his laws and a man tries to sleep in the desert. (“Imagine a name for each month and each month represented by a star, which would give an endless account and a time without interruption,” my dog whispers to try to distract me.) Dawn is sometimes lacerated by shooting stars lambasting the spirits who listen at the doors of God. Tradition says that this is how divination is explained. I know it almost by heart, the Book, but those verses about the night sky are my favorite. The private moments of a god, perhaps.
The clarity of stars and their constancy consoled me after I was hit and humiliated in front of my cousins—a catastrophic night without glory. But nothing explains my gift’s hesitation this time. I like to be precise. I was, during my long years of investigating death. I thought like a clockmaker so that I could study death like a piece of machinery, a set of cogs, and I was searching for the original spring. Because, as a teenager, the funereal routines piqued my curiosity. Starting from the funeral for my grandfather, who died in front of me on a Friday after nearly regaining his speech. When that happens, when someone dies, mourning takes on two faces. On one side, the women slap their thighs, throw themselves into each other’s arms, shout their heads off recalling the virtues of the dead person and their generosity, interrogate the Sky about who will be able to replace them; on the other, the men, serious, heads lowered under the will of God, organize the meal, erect the tent, decide the number of sheep to slaughter, and summon the reciters of the Holy Book. A curious reversal: the women become visible, audible in the streets, exuberant as though faced with an adversary (“Death is feminine, like birth,” concludes the dog), while the men are discreet, contradicting their virile force, their ambition to guarantee security.
Fascinated by this question during puberty, and a bit disoriented—for I hadn’t read much on the subject—I started to visit the surrounding douars, hurriedly, to watch the dead leave and study their final gestures, to witness the long ritual of funerals or follow the processions to the Bounouila cemetery. They got used to my presence. Blinded by the memory of local saints and the great sermons of imam Senoussi, the villagers wanted to interpret it as the beginning of a profound faith, but then they realized it was an inhuman curiosity, even though my gaze and gestures showed the indubitable traces of compassion. For me, death was not a matter of religion but of laws that I had to decipher, mind clear and soul cold, and the village inhabitants came to understand that. Today I realize I wasn’t convincing. I didn’t recite the correct verses, I didn’t have the serious, customary body language that one adopts in the face of divine will,
and I spoke little of God to the family of the deceased, only asking questions about the concrete details of their last hour, the color of their skin and the temperature of their feet and hands. At the cemetery, I didn’t pray with the others standing around the hole, I jostled to see the final burial and scrutinize their faces from up close. The peasants weren’t literate but they had a reliable and perspicacious instinct. So in the end they chased me away from the burials and barred my access to the families in mourning.