by Salim Bachi
And the beggar prince watched the bogus caliph pass by like an idol that had to be burnt, shivering in horror at the thought of what would eventually become of all this power, which was nothing but a magical yet destructive masquerade, a grotesque farce that would destroy both story and storyteller.
And Sinbad listened to him, hungry for adventures and desperate for rest, dozing in the subdued light of a palace where—in a courtyard bathed with light—a fountain sobbed.
Amid tears, songs and laughter, a man like any other crossed seas and battled with fabulous animals; he encountered biblical fish that fed flocks, and continents on which the distant descendants of caravaneers had been shipwrecked. The caravaneers ruled the seas and dropped anchor beside the islands of Java or Sumatra, or the Islands of the Moon, which were governed by playing-card kings, interchangeable figures who rode horses from the sea, strange creatures born of sea spray and wave.
And Sinbad the Porter clung tight to the talons of the giant bird, the Rukh, during a dream brought on by the opium he’d eaten in the sweetmeats served up by the real Sinbad, who was master of this strange ceremony. He flew over mountains and oceans, overcame his fear, and came back to Baghdad even richer, where he surrounded himself with his kin, a brotherhood of hashish-smokers whose gossip inspired the hordes of storytellers appearing in all the souks of the round city which, in the year 1000, boasted a million inhabitants. It was the biggest city in the world.
VII
INFLUENCED by what I was reading, I dreamt comically that I was the destroyer of the Eternal City. It was as if I wanted to punish the poor inhabitants of this sleepy little town in modern Italy for my dismal isolation in the company of a madwoman who designed stage sets and was desperate for me to take Italian lessons; a painter cursed with the improbable name of Michelangelo—poor sod—who fervently messed about with colours in his studio; an art historian, Jean Dubois, who indulged in vices worthy of a Borgia; and a dissonant musician, Diego the Portuguese. Not forgetting Jeanne and Pauline, two writers captivated by ugliness and triviality whose work, which bored me to tears, was destined for a bright literary future, despite the fact that they’d only just begun it, and Federico Di Lano, an occasional poet, a born artist and the only Italian out of that group who knew a little French.
Federico was always hanging around Michelangelo and he used to sit in on the dauber’s lengthy work sessions. The latter was trying to reproduce the exact shade of Rome, his holy grail, the slightly dirty ochre of the city’s façades. He’d bought metres and metres of canvas for his black work, then had hung them in his studio and had covered them in a rusty colour. He lived in the hope of one day exhibiting the fruit of his alchemical quest in a New York gallery.
I really don’t want to provide a longer list of the men and women who made my life a living hell. It’s enough to give you an overview and, anyway, I only remember the most famous ones. The people whom the world will still be talking about in centuries to come. For that matter, who knows what has become of them? I sit here in this gloomy room in Carthago talking to you, and I have no idea where they are today. You make up all kinds of stories, you delude yourself about people, you imagine that you think and feel the same as them, that you share their hopes and dreams in some way. Wrong: you’re way off base: former acquaintances fade away in the golden twilight of our lives. All those weirdos are nothing but shadows now. They could be at the height of their fame, but I, the man from Carthago, wouldn’t even sense their presence—it would be even less real than yours, my lord, or that of your dog with its putrid breath.
It would have been a great help to have had Robinson there! With his feet firmly on the ground and his head in the stars, he would have been able to sort out this world of smoke and mirrors. Naturally, I did go back to the Corso, but there wasn’t any trace of that purveyor of fascist posters. I asked other Africans doing the same job where he was, but all I got were shrugs, vague directions and far-fetched stories about the tall Senegalese being picked up by a rich Roman woman and given board and lodging, with silk bed sheets, in exchange for his manly attentions: “After all, my brother, everyone knows that we Africans are more energetic in the sack than you Arabs; it’s true, brother, obviously you’ve got a little African in you, but you aren’t black and you’ve spent too much time mixing with those Toubabs, who’ve got no balls, my friend, and that’s a fact”—and they all shouted with laughter on the Corso, annoying the good people of Rome with their loud, joyful guffaws.
But there was Vitalia, or, rather, the memory of Vitalia to cheer me up or drive me to despair when I felt lonely. Vitalia, whose breath swept me along on the crest of dreams, at the vanguard of my youthful socialism, at the time when the mad leaders of my country had decided to mongrelize the revolution by adding a dash of Islam to strengthen the two ideologies. This had resulted in the death of the first and such a rebirth of the second that it had become the ultimate taboo to talk about love in Carthago. I countered the traumatic effects this had on me by falling madly in love with the first woman to appear on the scene. Vitalia was the victim of all my frustrations.
In the meantime, Jeanne and Pauline showed me a good time, since the two authoresses were not averse to the games of love. Those Amazons came onto me at night, when Giovanna was on duty with that old fool of a director. I tiptoed to their room, tapped on their door, pulled out the peg and the latch fell. One of the noble maidens, Pauline—the taller, thinner and blonder—pulled me onto the bed where they both slept, naked as children, though their hips and breasts were broad as splayed fans, and, sandwiching me between their hot bodies, they examined me thoroughly. This intricate threesome was a strange kind of loving; I investigated one, while the other set about me. I was a plaything of flesh and nerves, a harp, a zither, a woman, in their expert hands, under their aggressive lips and insinuating tongues. I surrendered my manhood and let Jeanne and Pauline invade me. I had never before experienced such indecency from fingers and eyes as they played with me, forcing me to adopt strange positions. This may seem odd to mere mortals who have never come across the kind of love in which the person who thinks he’s calling all the shots isn’t. At times they seized my cock and sucked me off, then made me enter the opening of the woman who was the more attractive of the two, but not the more submissive. Then they’d neglect me, abandoning me on the side of the bed while they had fun on their own, a sight which could have brought a dead man back to life and which more than made up for being left to my own devices. I played with myself while they brazenly went down on each other, laughing and moaning quietly, and this was how it went on for most of the night, before they again ganged up on me, pouncing like lionesses on their poor prey who was bristling with a monumental erection—I’m generous towards my own anatomy, God helps those who help themselves—anyway, the amorous hussies impaled themselves by turns on my mast, moving faster and faster, one on my lower abdomen, the other on my face or bruised mouth; they had barely broken into a sweat, while I was almost dead, but happy, and then they came over my cock, my balls, my stomach, as I shot my load in turn like a hanged man. It’s hardly surprising, really, that I went over every other evening to help Jeanne and Pauline write another page of their intimate novel. They were loving and indispensable company for me, as was Giovanna who also possessed hidden treasures which, unfortunately, she had no wish to share with the twins, out of fear or distrust of Sapphic love.
ONE EVENING, I attend the wedding of one of the Golem’s members of staff. The family has hired the Villa Medici for the wedding party.
Women in evening dresses, men wearing tails, all of them from Naples, Federico tells me.
Big band, forties jazz music: Glenn Miller. Boring.
I slip on a jacket and dark trousers and gatecrash the wedding. At the end of the evening, a man dressed in white with enormous, blue-tinted glasses, comes up on stage in front of the band and begins singing. He must be in his sixties or seventies at least. According to Federico, he’s an Italian singer who hasn’t ap
peared on stage for twenty-five years.
“He’s famous,” explains Federico, “for his connections with the Italian and American mafia.”
The old man sings two or three songs, applauded by the guests who are singing along to the choruses. He even dances a couple of waltz steps with a buxom woman in a red dress. He leaves the stage just as quickly and disappears. I feel like I’m watching the beginning of The Godfather.
The band goes back to playing old American standards. No one is dancing. Except the lady in red, who has nothing to lose. The Italians don’t spend a lot of time on dance floors. They don’t like making an exhibition of themselves. Just like they don’t swim when they’re on the beach. They sunbathe. In Rome, you have to keep yourself to yourself if you want to make a good impression.
It’s two o’clock in the morning. The party is over. Jean Dubois, Michelangelo and I head into Rome. Dubois has an old car that his parents gave him.
Jean Dubois is your stereotypical Villa resident: Catholic, from a good family, and married, he spends happy days at the Villa where he can pretend to be an artist. Anyway, on Sundays, he immerses himself in his painting, with a straw hat perched on his head. He and his friend Diego, the Portuguese musician, bring girls up to his room where they and Diego display their prowess while Dubois sketches them. Sometimes Jeanne and Pauline join in, but they often forgo the pleasure when they see the surprise guests. Diego and Dubois, who aren’t very choosy, tend to pick up pretty much anyone hanging around the Villa.
“Life is beautiful!” yells Jean Dubois, driving his sports car at speed through the night.
The Colosseum, the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Palatine Hill, the Pyramid of Cestius, the Via Appia and the Baths of Caracalla flash by.
I remember a day spent inside the high walls of the baths built by Caracalla, an absolute monarch who was as formidable as you’d expect from a “barely integrated barbarian”, words you might hear these days from French nationalists. People also had concerns in ancient times and, although Arabs who have since become Muslims are now feared in France, at that time people were suspicious of Orientals and Africans. It didn’t matter whether the finest achievements of the Roman Empire dated from the reign of Caracalla or not; people preferred the refined barbarism of Hadrian, who ordered the execution of the architect of the Pantheon. Septimius Severus—Caracalla’s father, who was born in Libya, at Leptis Magna, and whose majestic arch leads into the Forum, where you can still enjoy wandering aimlessly among the ancient stones—came under fire for the same thing. Another uncultured African on the Roman throne, what a scandal for historians of the century of colonialism!
So I strolled inside the walls of the baths where every Roman had come to bathe, irrespective of social class, and I wondered whether the slaves came here together with their masters. I walked beside the stone cliffs, through the rooms beneath a pure, empty sky, and over the ancient mosaics. Then I sat down to fantasize about the glory which was sure to welcome me with open arms on my return to Carthago. A futile daydream, as I later discovered.
Another magical place in Rome, where I could forget the din of the town, was the Palatine Hill. This hanging garden, this vast mirror to time, is such a pleasant place to walk that I imagined myself a poet of the same stature as Goethe, depicted in some amateurish painting with a hat on his head, a blade of grass in his mouth, sitting languidly in the shade of a cypress tree, here on the Palatine Hill, meditating on the end of civilization. It was really the only spot in Rome where you could relax, and it was always a place of refuge for me when my love for Vitalia was tearing me apart.
So you can imagine my surprise when I saw Robinson there, selling postcards, dressed as a gladiator.
“What are you doing here? The sailor has come ashore! What a laugh!”
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I asked after you on the Corso. No one knew where you were hiding.”
“My dear Sinbad, I met a woman… and what a woman! A Roman from the Piazza di Spagna, Via Marghutta. The love of my life…”
“How old?”
“Love doesn’t care how old a woman is, if she’s from a good family. Anyway, how old is your Vitalia?”
“Er…”
“See, you scoundrel… I, on the other hand, pick a mature woman who is comfortable in her Prada shoes and who has a downcast arse but a cheerful purse. And I enjoy sweet fragrances, like our Prophet, Mohammed; as well as women.”
Robinson was Senegalese and, what’s more, a Tijani, from the Sufi brotherhood that had produced many wise men. Robinson must have been its final representative. He’d inherited the calm, slow religiosity of a shepherd from his ancestors.
“What has happened to your Roman lady?” I asked.
“She hung herself.”
“Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that, very… sorry…”
Robinson threw back his head and laughed dementedly, which was shocking in the circumstances. He was crazy.
“She hung herself around another black man’s neck! What did you think I meant? That she committed suicide? That’ll be the day. Women never give themselves a hard time! All we are to them is doormats to be beaten this way and that. Look at you, poor sod, you’re pining for a little slut who doesn’t give a damn about you. Or you’re being used as a vibrator by your Giovanna and God knows who else in that villa.”
“What about you, Robinson, aren’t you sick of making an exhibition of yourself dressed up as a gladiator? That is, when you’re not selling pictures of Il Duce’s ugly mug.”
“I’m being pushed to these terrible extremes by African poverty. Look where rampant national stupidity in Algeria has got you.”
“We can’t blame our motherlands for everything!”
“What else can we do, colonialism no longer sells. You can’t blame the Whites, the Pieds-Noirs, the French army or the paratroopers any more. They decamped fifty years ago.”
“Without those criminals, things might have been a little more peaceful back in the old country. Two centuries of colonization is the kiss of death for a continent, Robinson! You can’t deny that. Not to mention slavery.”
“I’m not a slave, Sinbad. No more hassle, no more cotton fields, cudgels and whips. It’s the same for you Algerians: your Frenchies have gone. What exactly are you waiting for before waking up and sounding the clarion call for development? You have the oil, the women activists and the men to start the turbines! All you do is kill each other instead of avenging the honour of Africa, avenging the insult.”
Good old Robinson was right. We were living in the hell created by our unsuccessful attempts at independence. We got bogged down, so we fled to the other side of the world to live off the scraps thrown by our former masters. Why? No reason, just to have a bit more fun before the big sleep. But, more than anything, I wanted to preserve that unique, affectionate, loving faith inside me that embraced all that life possessed of beauty: women and their unassailable youth, reflected in a mirror held up to combat nothingness. I sought consolation in Giovanna’s arms the way I had sought consolation in Vitalia’s arms, well aware that this would also come to an end one day, and that I would have to put out to sea again and drift; a life without destiny, a bundle cast onto the waves and carried away by wind and tide, and icy currents, and weary death.
Often, at night, alone again in my bed after love’s embraces, I conjured up Vitalia’s face and the old sorrow surged through me. Why did that girl haunt me so? We’d barely spoken to each other: the only language we’d known was making the beast with two backs. Of course, the little flirt had taught me a few words of Italian. I knew how to fuck in the language of Dante but I still didn’t know Vitalia’s hopes and dreams, I didn’t know how old she was, even though I had a feeling that she was no older than Proust’s young girls in flower. She came back every evening and stood at the foot of my bed like an ancient heroine giving herself to her lover, weary of a long courtship, burning like a flame, but just as fitful, so I had to take her in the space of a breath
, in case she was blown out.
VIII
ONE NIGHT, I heard someone knocking at the door of my room. I opened it to find a tall man dressed in black standing there, silent as an apparition. He was wearing a stained, wide-brimmed felt hat that had seen better days.
“I’m a painter.”
“You can call me Sinbad.”
“The real Sinbad? The Sailor? It’s an honour.”
He took my hand and shook it as if he were trying to work it loose.
“My name’s Ingres. I’ve been thinking about you for years while I was painting. I was brought up on your adventures.”
No one ever knows the effect they have on other people, and even though I didn’t really understand, I still felt flattered.
“My adventures?”
“Sinbad, your voyages are famous. The adventures of Sinbad the Seaman. All the children in the world know who you are.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The moving island? The Rukh bird? The monkey-men and the giant who roasted men? The pit of the dead? The old man of the sea? The valley of diamonds? The golden voyage? Your last. Don’t tell me you don’t remember!”
