Hear Our Defeats

by Laurent Gaudé

  He is driving southward. The August heat causes the air to vibrate. On his left is the Adriatic coast. Before he reaches Barletta he leaves the main road and heads inland. Initially he doesn’t see it, then at last there is a little sign indicating the presence of a river: the Olfanto. At this time of year the riverbed is dry and it seems so narrow, so insignificant. No more than a ravine full of weeds. By the side of the road, after a bend, there are prostitutes standing in the shade of an unfinished bridge. Fifteen-year-old kids. They must be Romanian or Albanian. With the bodies of children, almost no breasts, but already their poses are lascivious. He has time to look at them as he drives by. The road is narrow. They call out to him, make gestures that try to be enticing but are simply terribly sad. They are in the middle of nowhere, in this sunstruck countryside, along a little road with no trucks going by. What are they doing there, beneath that dirty bridge, lurking like alley cats? He drives on. It is all depressing, but when seen as a whole, the silence of the place lends it a majestic beauty. And what if they were part of that beauty? Those little girls with their tainted bodies, there in the middle of nowhere. Everything is where it belongs. Ugliness and beauty. Sacrifice of innocence and majesty of nature, nature that keeps silent because it is too hot, but it is biding its time, waiting for the day to fade or the wind to rise, waiting to make noise and come to life again.

  She has managed to delay her flight for two days. She wants to stay here in Tunis, on this avenue Bourguiba, which the barbarians look upon with hatred because of its freedom, because women walk down it and look straight ahead, proud they took part in the fall of the dictator. She wants to stay in Tunis because there is a headiness in the air. Like in Erbil. Who knows what these places will be like in a year or two? Who knows whether this is the beginning of a new era, vast and full of possibility, or just a parenthesis that will soon be closed? At Bab El Bhar she hails a taxi and has it take her to Sidi Bou Said. She wants to drive along the coast, let her gaze linger on the Carthaginian sites. She asks the taxi to go by the Punic port, down the street where there is the entrance to the children’s cemetery. He tries to explain to her that it will make the trip longer, but she insists, she doesn’t want to stop, or get out of the car, just drive by and see for herself that everything is there, immutable, and that nothing trembles, because these places have lived through the fall of civilizations and oblivion and the solitude of time, but are still there, in spite of everything, watching us.

  He eventually reaches his destination and parks the car outside the entrance to the site. There is no one around. It occurs to him that it might even be closed. At this time of day, in the middle of August, when it is so hot . . . And yet it isn’t closed. The door is unlocked and a little man is sitting in the ticket office. He doesn’t seem surprised to see a visitor, nor does he ask any questions, whereas Assem muses that if he were in the man’s shoes he would be curious to find out what brings people here. It is very quiet. He doesn’t spend any time in the building but heads immediately up the hill. Canne della Battaglia. That is what they call the place nowadays. From up here he can see the sea. Behind him the sun is setting. A gentle wind blows in from the sea and makes a faint whisper in the pine trees. There is not a soul around. An ancient silence. To his left he has a perfect view of the Gargano Promontory in the distance. Below him, down the hill to the sea, there are pine trees and oleander, and always this silence. Vineyards now cover the area where the battlefield was. What sort of wine do they produce? Over the years the roots must have worked their way through fragments of weapons, of skeletons. He can hear the peaceful cooing of turtledoves in the distance. It all radiates a feeling of peace. The road, the towns, the heat of the crowd are all far away. And yet he is standing on a graveyard. Canne della Battaglia. It was here that Hannibal defeated the Roman army. Here that in the space of a few hours forty-five thousand Romans were slain. The plain there below him, so lovely, so gentle, stank of viscera for a very long time. He tries to imagine it: forty-five thousand mutilated, dying men, still moving slightly, trying in vain to drag themselves somewhere or begging for someone to come and help. Perhaps this is why the place seems so silent: it is the silence of the grave. How can the site of one of the greatest bloodbaths in human history be magnificent? He feels the warm wind from the sea fill him. The summer light settles gracefully on the distant hills. Job is back there, dead by his own hand as he released the grenade, blown to bits by the explosion, beheaded by his own will. It is all over now. The air is soft. So he leans down to the ground. There. At the top of the hill. And he begins to dig a hole at his feet, slowly, without hurrying.

  They reach the very top of the village of Sidi Bou Said. The taxi driver stops by the lighthouse. She pays him, gets out, and walks to the little marine cemetery that sits imposingly at the top of the hill. There is an expansive view over the sea. She perches on the little wall and gazes out at the immensity. She is very close to him. In the same stillness of the world, she is withdrawing, like him, to let the silence of the hills enter her; nothing else matters. She has come here to pay tribute to Khaled al-Asaad. The old man was tortured for days. The barbarians wanted to know where the treasure of Palmyra was hidden. He resisted, scorned them until the end. They took a knife and beheaded him in the very place that had been his entire life. And then they suspended his body on a cable from a crane, with his head propped on the ground by his feet. Old Priam, violated even in death. Not for him the shade of the tower tombs or the soft earth of Tadmur. He is floating, heavy and ugly, in the hot desert air, like a carcass at the slaughterhouse. Tomorrow they will raze Palmyra. Tomorrow they will dynamite the ancient city’s temple of Bel, the tower tombs, and the avenue of columns. Nothing can stop them. She wants to think about him. So she gets up, with the cemetery’s tombs behind her, and she closes her eyes as she turns toward the sea. She lets the wind fill her. She thinks of Khaled al-Asaad and murmurs an old prayer in Aramaic. So that Antiquity will be there, by her side. The graves of the marine cemetery look out at the horizon, toward Cap Bon, and perhaps only the sea remembers the submerged worlds.

  In this handful of earth there was once shouting and fighting, there was pain, and a silence of the dead. He thinks again of Job, who will never be buried; Job blown apart. He knows that it is all far behind him now, and as he reaches for the statue in his pocket, he feels the dead watching him. Job is here. And others, too. People he met. People he killed. But that doesn’t stop him. There is something stronger, more harmonious, than that. He thinks of Mariam, who gave him this statue. And he knows that she would understand what he is about to do. Mariam, who has traveled with him and who, at this very moment, is on the far shore of the Mediterranean, at Sidi Bou Said, all the way at the top of the village, at the marine cemetery, on the little wall overlooking the sea. Something makes its way between them in this vestigial daylight. He takes out the statue of the god Bes she has given him, the statue that survived the digs and was handed down like a secret, the ugly, deformed dwarf god with his disproportionate penis who watches over humans and drives away evil spirits, he takes it out, he knows nothing about its history, not even what it means, he remembers what Mariam told him about the Apis bull during their night of lovemaking, the tomb of the sacred bulls, he remembers the column of blue vapor that emerged from the tomb for four hours once Mariette Pasha opened the door to the Serapeum, and it is as if the statue he is holding between his hands had the power to seal the holes in tombs. What escaped, back then—the polluted air of centuries; what was lost—the footprint of the last priest: it is as if the statue could set it all right again. He handles it with deference and sets it in the hole he has dug. The statue must tremble at feeling the earth again. Does it know that Egypt is far away? No. Because Egypt is in fact very near, just as Mariam in this moment is also very near, at the marine cemetery in Sidi Bou Said, and in the tranquility of the light falling gently, weightlessly, upon the earth. Does she know he is laying the statue in its hole? To him this is its purpo
se: to bury his shadows, and all the others, the shadows of the thousands who died at Canne della Battaglia. At last there is a god to watch over them, the dwarf god who used to be placed beneath the head of the deceased to calm them and keep anguish at bay. He is burying the statue there on the hill at Canne della Battaglia, and they all feel relieved. Hear our defeats. He is burying it there so that it will watch over the Gauls from the front line who did not yield, and over Hannibal who was poisoned; let the statue with its contorted hairy monster’s grimace watch over Grant and Sherman, the burned victors, and the hundreds of thousands of young men who would have no life. Hear our defeats. Let it watch over Khaled al-Asaad, too, the beheaded Priam. Assem is burying the statue and that is his way of proclaiming his own defeat, of giving it a name. He is not sad, it is something he does gently, serenely. We have lost. Not because we showed ourselves unworthy, not because of our mistakes or our lack of discernment, we have been neither prouder nor more insane than others, but we embrace defeat because there is no victory, and the decorated generals, the emblems whom society venerates so fervently, they agree, they have always known this, they went too far, they lost themselves for too long for there to be a victory. Hear our defeats. He is burying the statue but it could also be Mariam herself doing it, on the far side of this Mediterranean Sea that has seen so much light and so much blood. And actually she is doing it, with the long circular gaze she sends sweeping over the sea, she is burying the statue, she too is thinking about the man she once met in Zurich but who has been with her ever since, because he gave her these verses, “Body, remember . . . ,” at a time when it was what she needed more than anything: the memory of the body’s pleasure, the imperious necessity of remembering what we are, yes, pleasure in the face of barbarity, sensual delight and struggle, she is full of that night and, like him in that same moment, naked in the face of the immensity before her. They love each other. They are not in the same place, they cannot see each other, they are simply both looking out at the same sea, that Mediterranean of blood and joy where peerless worlds have been born, and they love each other. Never mind the fact that their story—unlike the others—began with their bodies and is being written backwards, now, in absence; she sees him, she knows that they carry the same defeat within themselves, the defeat of time causing us, gently, to yield, the defeat of our vigor, diminishing, vanishing. Hear our defeats. There is no sadness, she has not lost anything, nor has he. He leans forward, covers the statue of the dwarf god with soil, and the earth shudders with relief. Something has been restored. The statue will be there for centuries to come, incongruous, perhaps, in this soil plowed by the sword and peopled by skeletons, but he knows this is as it should be. He knows that Job is watching, that on the far side of the sea Mariam is among the steles at the marine cemetery in Sidi Bou Said, on the territory of the Empire that never was, because Rome swallowed it, burned it, caused it to disappear, but it remains all the stronger for it, and can be found whole again in the word “Carthage,” which contains everything, Carthage, the glorious city that defeated oblivion despite the ashes, hear our defeats, they say it together, with a sort of sweetness and delight, hear our defeats, we were only human, there could be no victory, only desire, until the submersion, only desire and the gentle touch of warm wind on our skin.

  All of Haile Selassie’s words in chapter VII are quotations taken from the speech he gave at the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva on June 30, 1936.

  The quotation from Cavafy is from the poem entitled “Body, remember.” Translation Alison Anderson.

  The quotations from Mahmoud Darwish are from the poems “In Praise of the High Shadow” and “We Will Choose Sophocles.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Laurent Gaudé is a French novelist and playwright. After being nominated for the 2002 Prix Goncourt with The Death of King Tsongor, he won the award in 2004 for his novel The House of Scorta.