The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor

by Salim Bachi

  This prospective candidate for the emptiness of the deep was of Turkish descent, so there was a danger that he might not be accepted for the training programme. They didn’t trust second-generation French seamen. Besides, few of them fitted in, being snubbed by the other seamen, who were racist. This man had quite a mouth on him, so the other men treated him with respect. Some of them preferred to hand in their resignation while others put up with it. But nothing prevented this youngster, this Captain Nemo in the making, from dreaming of the deep. Had he read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? No. He wasn’t much of a reader. He didn’t have time on board La Marne… Do you need time to read? Yes, of course. So where did he get this vague dream from? He was fascinated by technology, engines and machines, and by far the sexiest of them all was powered by atomic energy; it was machine royalty, man’s mechanical future, the power of fire harnessed in a box by man as machine. Jules Verne would have felt at home with these men.

  MAJOR SIED pulled on a tool belt and made for the laundry, where he would kit out his men with thick fireproof clothes and oxygen cylinders. The drill would last half an hour. After that, the seamen would train with pump-action rifles. As Commandant Bedaud explained, La Marne was lightly armed for defence purposes. He had previously served on a submarine before ending up on a refuelling tanker: a massive vessel which was more like a floating fridge than a frigate. In the Commandant’s view, the tanker had nothing on the submarine, which was a marvel.

  You soon became burnt out on a submarine, though. One day, the doc would summon you to his office and tell you it was time to return to the surface. It was never a big drama. But when they came back up, the men weren’t really men any more. They’d lost all contact with the real world, provided that it really exists in the first place, philosophized the Commandant. They had no friends, no wives, no children… they had to rebuild their lives at the age of thirty-five. Impossible. The will wasn’t there any more. It was a bit like asking a monk to leave his order. Or telling Christ to get down from his cross. There was no doubt the Commandant knew his history, since he’d written a play about Pontius Pilate.

  “The Libyans want us to fly a courtesy flag.”

  “And is that a problem, Commandant?”

  “It goes against all the laws of navigation. Every single one. I will refer this to a higher authority. I can’t make this decision on my own. We’re not going to disembark if it means backing down. Out of the question!”

  Naturally, when we disembarked, we were flying the Libyan flag.

  In Tripoli, after we had landed on the shores of the Gulf of Sirte, Robinson and I prepared to say our farewells.

  “Well, mate, I’m heading home; through the vast desert expanses.”

  “That’s the road to Medina!”

  “Stop lecturing me, Sinbad. Haven’t you got anything better to do than show off your cultural knowledge to a barbarian like me?”

  “Culture is you, Robinson!”

  “I’m sorry, Sinbad… about Vitalia…”

  I think I wept then, like a child, overcome with sadness. Robinson put his arms around me and began singing a Negro lullaby. I didn’t understand many of the words, but it warmed my cold heart.

  We were walking through old Tripoli in the sunshine. The country seemed to be laying itself open. A sign on the wall of the citadel announced in Arabic: “We are happy to live in the time of the supreme leader.” There were still some fine times ahead of the Cyclops. Robinson took his leave and headed off into Tripoli’s narrow streets. I lost sight of him near a stall where a coppersmith was working at his craft: one of the town’s many attractions, a scene which could have been lifted from one of the Corto Maltese comics. The light was gentle, like an old acquaintance, and blue as an orange. I stopped near an ancient tenth-century minaret. It looked like a lighthouse. The song of the muezzin trickled out through the loopholes. I thought it was probably prayer time. I entered the mosque and knelt on the carpet. My soul was empty and my words had no meaning. They bubbled up like a wild song in the dim light. I swallowed my sorrow and my tears. I drank them. They were bitter and I vomited them onto the carpet, surrounded by the night music of the soul. I vomited this world like a sailor after a drunken night on the town.

  XI

  AFTER MY LIBYAN EPISODE, I had gone back to Carthago and had immediately been thrown into jail and put on a diet of dry bread and water.

  What was I accused of?

  Poisoning Carthago’s president for life, Chafouin I. According to some well-informed sources, a meal of couscous wolfed down one evening with a few soldiers from a rival clan had caused this tragedy, which was—quite wrongly—laid at my door.

  When Chafouin I, president for life, had swallowed his last chickpea, he began suffering horrific spasms and fiendish pains. He then brought up the couscous, the meatballs and sundry rotten vegetables, along with part of his stomach. At the sight of this visceral avalanche, they shoved him, covered with blood and vomit, onto a private jet which took him to France, and the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris, straight into the lion’s jaws, really, if you consider that Chafouin I had been inveighing against the former colonial power only the evening before, asking the international authorities to impose sanctions on the fucking French who’d tortured Algerians as well as independent, popular Algeria, something that Chafouin I, King of the North African Belgians, refused to condone.

  While I was in jail, I had time to miss Vitalia and sweet Giovanna. I remembered the former’s voluptuous curves and her skin sweet as fruit, our reunion in Sicily, and our eternal love sanctified by death; when I remembered the latter, I recalled the image of a woman as hot as summer days. Anyway, I had been receiving passionate letters from her since she’d somehow tracked me down, although I’m not sure how. I would learn later that my disappearance had created quite a stir in Rome. Giovanna, as militant as they come, just the way I like my women, spread the news through the Eternal City, Urbi et Orbi, and even appealed to Pope Ratzinger, who sanctimoniously informed her that he couldn’t give a damn about the fate of one Mohammedan, who was just as quarrelsome as the rest of his race. To back up his words and by way of a reply to the beautiful Giovanna, who’d jeopardized her reputation by consorting with the Infidel, he produced a kind of papal bull in which he implied, by means of a completely invented dialogue which was supposed to have taken place in the thirteenth century, that the sons of Islam were arrant rogues and foul murderers.

  “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only bad and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” added Benedict XVI, quoting, for Giovanna’s benefit, a sentence from a fourteenth-century dialogue in which a Byzantine emperor is addressing a “cultivated Persian”.

  There were even a few Muslim intellectuals who praised the Immobile Pope’s broad theoretical vision and felt he was voicing a sound criticism of the deadliest religion in humanity, which was theirs only by chance. The beautiful and very wise Giovanna told the Holy Roman Church that, even in the thirteenth century, peace-loving Christians had burnt the Albigensians at the stake, and that during the Crusades in Syria, at Maarat, the home town of the famous poet Abul Ala Al-Ma’arri, they had carved and eaten Infidels at a great feast, which would have horrified Christ. The Sinbad Affair, which was now going global, wasn’t helped by the fact that Turkish fanatics raped the last three nuns left on the Anatolian plateau and slit the throats of two Orthodox priests, who hadn’t digested the papal bull. During this period, Bush’s Americans invaded and destroyed Iraq, scattering several thousand years of history and looting the national museum in Baghdad which had housed the treasures of Mesopotamia. They burnt the early manuscripts of the Qur’an and decimated the circular town, exactly as the Mongols had done in bygone days, followed by Basra, the port where Sinbad used to drop anchor when he returned from each of his voyages and which was, from then on, as English as in the good old days of the British Empire on which the sun never sets. I should
make it clear that I’m referring to the real Sinbad here, the man of legend, not the poor prisoner who, despite a worldwide campaign, had been rotting in the presidential jail for several months. But Giovanna hadn’t had her final say: she threatened Paduzzi di Balto that she would go public about their private life, since she’d barely reached the age of consent when their affair started, if he did nothing to help one of the Villa Medici’s former residents. Paduzzi knew a lot of people in Paris. He obtained the help of Jacques Chirac, who insisted that his great friend President Chafouin I, whose pitiful illness had been treated at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital, should set free the most inoffensive political prisoner in the world. The latter granted his request on condition that he in turn would give Sinbad asylum in France. He didn’t want someone like Sinbad in Carthago any more, whether he was a patriotic nationalist or not.

  So I arrived in Paris to be greeted by a cheering crowd. Giovanna, who was waiting for me at the airport, proposed to me after suffocating me in her arms for far too long and showering me with tears of happiness. I’d only just escaped from captivity, and I wasn’t about to return to it; still stunned by the crowd’s jubilation and the size of the welcoming committee at Charles de Gaulle airport, who were celebrating my arrival as though I were the Messiah, I refused the bonds of marriage which I felt were more terrifying than the smallest dungeon. In a fit of pique, Giovanna returned to Rome where, rumour has it, she’s enjoying a good life with her one true love, Paduzzi di Balto.

  IWAS DAZZLED by Paris, the City of Light, a name I’d shout out loud while strolling along its boulevards or walking by the Seine, remembering Apollinaire. At Père Lachaise cemetery, I bowed down before Balzac’s tomb. If I hadn’t held myself back for fear of being mocked by the girls laying flowers on the grave of that drunkard Jim Morrison, I’d probably have exclaimed, like my cult hero, Rastignac: “It’s between the two of us now!”

  Since it’s never too late to get an education, I enrolled at the Sorbonne, where I was intending to read classics. At the university, I wasn’t disappointed: I was the only man in my year and all the other students were women who were certainly not backward in coming forward. I lost no time in inviting them to my room at 35 Boulevard du Montparnasse, a stone’s throw from Rue Campagne-Première, where Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon had conducted their secret love affair. My landlady, France, was very fond of me, even if she did scold me gently for the trail of broken hearts I left in my wake.

  France was an attractive woman in her forties, who’d left her husband, Monsieur Tschann, to run off with a Malian poet called Hérode, whom I disliked intensely. He regarded himself as the spiritual son of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the great grammarian before God and, besides that, one of the poets who had created the Négritude movement, which had been enjoying a new lease of life since his death. As I preferred Aimé Césaire, who was more sincere, I decided that Hérode, France’s belligerent lover, was my sworn enemy. Hérode had published just two pamphlets and he already thought he was Ronsard, Du Bellay and the other members of the Pléiade rolled into one. He went around declaring that no one had produced better poetry since Boileau.

  Naturally, he adored Céline—he would read him aloud to France at night before bed—and was very proud of loving A La Recherche. He had also turned his hand to writing novels so that he might be ranked with Proust. After ten years of hard work, during which time he’d weighed each word the way a grocer weighs butter, chopped up his sentences the way a butcher chops cutlets, and bored France rigid with the migraines and bellyaches of a great writer, he finally succeeded in publishing a short novel called Le Bouton d’Anaïs: a metaphor for the war in Angola, seen through the eyes of a young, streetwise girl who prostituted herself to the soldiers of both camps. However, since Hérode had come up with the bright idea of making the girl talk like someone from the Guermantes family, the book was very funny.

  No one told him that it was, of course, especially France, blinded by love for her great prose writer.

  When he wasn’t cheating on France with primary-school teachers who shared his weakness for school-book French, Hérode would launch into cruel diatribes against all African writers who, he thought, spoke and wrote French perfectly. He’d place great emphasis on this adverb, rolling it around his mouth, opening his mocking eyes very wide, his lips pursed to roll the “r”s perfectly, showing his scorn for the little nigger of their ancestors. He’d been raised by the white fathers who’d instilled in him a love for his fellow man and the cadenced language of the Bible, while those shitty little scribblers would never be free of the chip on their shoulders that came from growing up in a colonized country bathed in the sun of independence; those piccaninnies had never seen a Vermeer, knew nothing about Monet (let alone Manet!), didn’t understand Picasso, had never even heard of Kandinsky and would never die like Bergotte in front of the little patch of yellow wall in Delft. What’s more, they were still idolaters, terrifying animists who pierced their nostrils, Jesuit-devouring cannibals, wild animals who voted by striking their paunches to the rhythm of the tom-tom, incestuous men who raped nuns at the slightest sign of revolt and hacked poor Tutsis to pieces with machetes, lechers who had their daughters circumcised, then sold them, and alkies who never smashed their glasses. He, on the other hand, drank his lime-blossom infusion or, occasionally, a little red wine to treat his ulcer, while reading L’après-midi d’un Faune and listening to the Gymnopédies.

  The only time he was a Negro was when he had to renew his residence papers at the police headquarters in Paris, where being Malian was essential as far as the cops were concerned and was even more important than his knowledge of French and all its subtleties. On that day, amidst all those anxious strangers with their hangdog expressions—I too had to submit to that humiliating ritual—he became the Negro he’d never ceased to be and I became the Arab with a knife gripped between my teeth.

  One day, I told Hérode about my admiration for the author of the New Voyages of Sinbad.

  “Hear that, France? Your young protégé… that writer…”

  Like a comic-opera Othello, Hérode was beside himself with jealousy if any young man went near France.

  “He lived here for a year,” recalled France with a hint of nostalgia that infuriated Hérode.

  “Lived, lived, that’s a bit of an overstatement! He was a snail, a hack! It’s a wonder he managed to write that novel at all.”

  “He was talented, my darling.”

  Hérode glared at her.

  “Much less talented than you, darling, of course. No doubt about that.”

  “Those Arabs”—you could tell the word had a capital letter!—“those Arabs can’t write. I tried to read his book: a complete dud in my opinion. It gave me such a headache. Too many sentences, too many words. You see, my dear Sinbad, the French language can’t tolerate overindulgence. It has a delicate stomach.”

  He gave a loud laugh. Then he fell silent, rubbing his stomach with a grimace.

  “His ulcer is hurting,” said France. “Poor darling. Would you like a glass of milk, my love?”

  “Milk! Always milk! Do you think literature can tolerate milk!”

  “What about Proust, darling, remember Proust. He drank a lot of milk.”

  “You’re right. A small glass won’t do me any harm.”

  France handed him his drink and he immersed his little round, black lips in it. They were white now and made him look like a child who’d smeared his face with chocolate at teatime. I couldn’t be annoyed with Hérode, I just thought he was juvenile and given to extremes of behaviour, like a child beaten by his parents at home, who begins striking his schoolmates in the playground.

  In Paris, I strolled along the Boulevard Montparnasse, lost myself in Rue de la Gaîté, and sat at a table on Place Quinet, musing on Pascin surrounded by his prostitutes, Picasso, rich and famous but still in love, all those radiant passers-by who’d filled the streets and cafés of this area, which still had its charms and yet was facing i
ts demise.

  I was appalled by death, which seemed like a lousy end to life’s slow dying. I didn’t understand the philosophers who denied death or poured scorn on it. I was a medieval man. I much preferred the danse macabre of plague-sufferers and witches to our modern-day denial, to the hospitals—those huge, cold, clean residences where the condemned were dumped out of sight and mind, like the old men and women who died alone in dingy apartments, things put away in a cupboard and forgotten. Death didn’t exist for my agile contemporaries, those little starlets who hurried up and down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, bought their cigarettes at Le Brazza at two o’clock in the morning or got drunk in La Coupole, that cold, impersonal tourist trap of a café-bar. Death had deserted the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where poor Rilke had walked with his creation, the terrible and solitary Malte Laurids Brigge:

  “Did I say it before? I’m learning to see—yes, I’m making a start. I’m still not good at it. But I want to make the most of my time.

  “For example, I’ve never actually wondered how many faces there are. There are a great many people, but there are even more faces because each person has several. There are those who wear one face for years on end; naturally, it starts to wear, it gets dirty, it breaks at the folds, it becomes stretched like gloves that are kept for travelling. These are thrifty, simple people; they don’t change their faces, and never for once would they have them cleaned. It’s good enough, they maintain, and who can convince them otherwise? Admittedly, since they have several faces, the question now arises: what do they do with the others? They save them. They’ll do for the children. There have even been instances when dogs have gone out with them on. And why not? A face is a face.