by Salim Bachi
“Everything. The town, the country. Nothing was here before you came into the world.”
“I remember some things.”
Memories so hazy that he sensed the lie beneath his own words. He had a premonition that everything he’d seen since his return—the town, the streets and the people, even Sinbad and Lalla Fatima—had been shadows from another life, before his long sleep, and they were coming back, not to haunt him, as he might have thought, but to show him the way to go. Naturally, he was totally in the dark about the road he had to take, about his mission, his destiny. He understood that he hadn’t come back for nothing, that his dog hadn’t regained its strength in vain. If he couldn’t sleep, there had to be a reason for it.
“Leave my grandson alone!”
“You mean Sinbad?”
“Yes, that’s exactly who I mean. You and your dog have to leave him in peace! He’s innocent. He’s already lost everything. He’s a broken man.”
“Everyone is guilty.”
“You’ve come here for revenge. I know that. You want to shed our blood to avenge what you believe was a betrayal. It isn’t my fault they captured you!”
Lalla Fatima drew herself up straighter: her hair was not so white, her shoulders not so narrow and her back not so bowed. Her steel-blue eyes sparkled again, her nipples showed beneath her blouse like those of a teenage girl, and her skin tautened, becoming as smooth and soft as it had been at the start.
The Sleeper didn’t understand what she meant with all this talk of betrayal and revenge, but he felt he was involved. He was the man she’d handed over to his enemies. In a moment of weakness, torn apart by her maternal feelings, she’d sacrificed her one true love.
“They had my father. They’d tortured him. They were going to kill him and take my daughter, Amel, God rest her soul, if I didn’t tell them something! So I gave them your name. And they captured you and dragged you away. I thought they had killed you. The paratroopers left and were replaced by other soldiers. We thought they were different. They didn’t wear the same uniform. They spoke our language, but they were the same as the others. You were dead, you understand, and I was as young and fresh as a spring flower. My breasts hurt, my belly was grumbling with hunger. I took a man who looked like you.”
Her cheeks were burning and she’d become as young as he remembered her. She had walked over to his bed, kneeled down and had stroked his face. She was twenty or maybe forty, but she was certainly no longer an old woman: Lalla Fatima was a budding flower whose petals were just opening.
“They took him as well. They were worse than their predecessors. They behaved just like them. They raped and murdered just like them. They put out the light that had been lit when the French left. They killed my husband and left me all alone with my daughter, Sinbad’s mother. That’s when I understood—I was paying my debt for abandoning you to the paratroopers. There are consequences if you sacrifice your first love. Look at what those bastards have done to their country. They’ve cast it into the fire in return for gold, black gold, which, I know without a doubt, brings only destruction and death. Like my life… which is in ruins, like this town… Carthago… Carthago… I’d never heard that name before, but it’s an accurate one. It’s the name of this monstrosity.”
She’d unfastened her dress. He caressed the young woman’s breasts, her belly, her thighs, her cunt. She rose above him, naked as the moon, and straddled him. He felt an inner stirring, his cock quickened and shifted between his legs, standing hard and long as a day of torment. Lalla Fatima mounted him like a mare, she reared so wildly and violently that it hurt a little, galloping through the flames of memory, her buttocks spread, her thighs dripping. The sound of her breathing filled the room where Dog was sleeping, her breath swept across his face, the face of an ageless man held captive by an unknown woman, similar to all women, able to take on all forms, a woman whose changeable, yet unchanging, truth was shown to him as it died with him.
Dog never slept. He never took his eyes off his master, Ooourugarri. Dog didn’t like the Other, Sinnnbaaad, as he’d heard him called. Sinnnbaaad. Dog growled when he heard him, smelt him, he didn’t like his Sea smell, his smell of salt and sweat. Dog also didn’t like the old creature who smelled of earth and dust. Her voice sounded unpleasant to Dog’s ear. It was a voice like a trickle of water about to run dry, a voice on the verge of stopping. If he’d been allowed, Dog would already have eaten Sinnnbaaad and the old creature who smelled of dry earth and rust. But Ooourugarri didn’t want him to, had not ordered him to. He still obeyed his master because Ooourugarri was stronger than him. Dog submitted to Ooourugarri, Dog respected he who was the stronger and, more than anything, Dog, who had experienced Hell, didn’t want to go back there for devouring Ooourugarri. He didn’t like the smell down there, in the Shadows. The smell of absence, or the absence of smell: hell for Dog; and also the absence of Light, just noise, deafening noise, the noise of rodents gnawing bones. Dog didn’t remember it very clearly now. He had no memory, or very little, he relied on his instincts, a mass of fleeting impressions, frightening or soothing gestures, pleasant or not so pleasant smells, which were always very interesting. Dog had been removed from the Shadows and had found himself in the Cave which wasn’t much brighter. But Dog could see there. He could see the Seven Sleepers and watch over them as he’d been told to do before he’d left the Shadows. He watched over each one of them and when one finally woke after his long sleep, a sleep lasting such an eternity that Dog lost count of the years, Dog split into two and one part of Dog followed him outside, while another part stayed with the remaining Sleepers. This division felt strange to Dog, leaving him in the Cave while another Dog, a Dog identical to Dog, romped in the Light. Eventually, the divisions stopped and Ooourugarri’s Dog was the last, the Collector. Yes. Dog still had a mission that no one knew. Dog was the Gatherer of legend, but Ooourugarri didn’t know that or didn’t seem to know. Dog wasn’t sure. The master was mighty even though he thought that he was growing weaker with the Traveller, who smelled of salt and sweat. When the Time came, Dog would summon the Others, the Six Dogs. They would run to him and they would prepare to fall upon their last supper. Dog licked his chops in advance. That would definitely be the Dogs’ last supper, the Kill. But before that long-awaited day, that glorious day for Dog, he had to put up with Sinnnbaaad and the old creature who smelled of dust and earth, and let them approach Ooourugarri. He had seen her coming, an ancient cloud of unbearable dust, a cloak of earth and death, to cover his master, who had stripped off his clothes to welcome Mut the fearsome, who could wield all the powers of seduction by taking on the shape of a young woman smelling of apples and fish, but who was, after all, and Dog knew it, the last refuge for maggots. Mut had risen, had covered his master with her body and Dog had growled at the danger. But Ooourugarri had raised his hand and had caressed her and Dog had fallen silent. Dog was a good dog. Dog was starving and was looking forward to the Day of Gathering.
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Copyright
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ
Original text © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2010
English translation © Sue Rose 2011<
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The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor first published in French as
Amours et aventures de Sindbad le marin in 2010
This translation first published by Pushkin Press in 2012
This book is supported by the Institut Français
as part of the Burgess programme (www.frenchbooknews.com)
ISBN 978 1 782270 07 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
The extract from Sinbad’s Fifth Voyage in Chapter XV was taken from
The Arabian Nights II: Sinbad and Other Popular Stories, translated by
Husain Haddawy. Copyright © 1995 by Husain Haddawy.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Also quoted is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,
translated from the German by William Needham
(http://www.archive.org/stream/TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge/
TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge_djvu.txt)
The author thanks the Centre National Du Livre for its support
Cover Illustration: Henry Rivers
© Henry Rivers 2012
www.pushkinpress.com
