Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Ali Bader

  Abd al-Rahman was in the habit of ordering drinks and food from Mikha the server. His table was usually filled with glasses of cognac and whiskey, pistachios, salad, fava beans, and chicken. Ismail was usually busy smelling the dancer’s dyed and unkempt hair and trying to kiss the Virgin of Existentialism’s neck. Abd al-Rahman demeaned himself before her; he would kneel in front of the dancer and flirt in a manner that naturally upset Ismail. Every now and then she would whisper something in his ear, her breath smelling of cheap cognac. He would laugh loudly and beat the table so hard that the cigarette butts in the ashtray would fly all over the table. Whenever the philosopher touched Wazzeh’s naked shoulders, she would laugh her frivolous laugh, adding to the impact of the loud music that fired up the place and tickled the philosopher’s senses. He would sing a song in French and tell his friends that it was the existentialist anthem, puzzling them with his incomprehensible French philosophy sung to a manic tune. Alcohol increased their nausea, and their eyes twinkled upon hearing this great philosophy.

  During one of those evenings at the nightclub, Ismail shouted, “Women—nothing matters in life but women and alcohol . . . .” No sooner had Abd al-Rahman heard these words, in fact before his companion could even finish his sentence, the philosopher stood up in anger. He wiped his forehead with his hairy, shaking hand, causing the place to come to a standstill. Everybody was terrified. He asked Ismail, “Have you forgotten existentialism, you son of a bitch? Has a dancer blotted out everything I’ve taught you?” Ismail was dumbfounded by Abd al-Rahman’s accusatory, high-strung tone. He lowered his head, and his shiny black hair fell over his eyes. He lit a cigarette with an unsteady hand, looked at Abd al-Rahman with drunken eyes, and said, “Oh no, Abd al-Rahman, philosopher of al-Sadriya, Sartre of the Arabs. I am nauseated, and this woman is existentialism personified. As for me, I am existence for existence’s sake.”

  These existential words, these philosophical sentences and deep Sartrian thoughts calmed Abd al-Rahman, while the poor dancers, the truly existential creatures, looked on, puzzled by this world turned upside down. They felt reassured, however, that the matter was solved with those magical words, and so they returned to their carousal. Abd al-Rahman, in contrast, was transported by Ismail’s response into his memories of the Jussieux nightclub in the Latin Quarter. He remembered the international fair in Montmartre, dancing gypsies moving as gracefully as tobacco leaves. The gypsy songs excited him and revived the memory of the enigmatic Parisian scenery composed of existentialism, garrulity, Latin philosophies, and women’s clothes decorated with layers of red lace. He said to Ismail, “Let’s transform Baghdad into another Paris. Let’s make it a second Paris, the capital of existentialism.” Surprised, Ismail wondered how this could be done.

  It was the sight of the Negro dancer from Basra that inspired in Abd al-Rahman the idea of a national existentialist movement. Her feminine, uninhibited dancing, the way she jumped up on the stage and revealed her brown body shining under the light, her thick lips and ivory white teeth, and her fishy smell—all this inflamed Abd al-Rahman’s imagination. He asked Ismail, “Who says that existentialism is not concerned with politics and national unity? Otherwise, what would Sartrian commitment mean?”

  After a paralyzing silence, an angel’s silence, Abd al-Rahman ordered the waiter to call the dancers, Dam‘ al-Ain, Wazzeh, Rizan the Kurd and her Arabic music ensemble, Lamia, Munibeh, and Saniya. He then declared the establishment of a National Existentialism for the unity of the people, with Sartre’s blessing. The nightclub turned into a wrestling arena, chairs and tables were up-ended, liquor bottles smashed, and plates of appetizers flew across the hall and skidded along the floor. Customers escaped through a side door, and the prostitutes were shouting. The waiters and cashiers were yelling at the top of their lungs. The dancers swayed like madwomen to the beat of the wild music and eventually fell to the floor. Abd al-Rahman and Ismail collapsed from excessive drinking and fatigue; the waiters picked them up and dumped them outside.

  3

  A few hours later a taxi drove Abd al-Rahman home. He was drunk, with a cigarette still in his mouth, and his jacket hung on his finger. Ismail had to push him out of the car. No sooner had he knocked on the door than he collapsed on the stoop. Moments later, while he was still on the ground, the iron door opened slowly. He had difficulty seeing through his liquor induced haze but was able to make out Germaine standing over him in her nightgown.

  The philosopher was an extreme existentialist. He was not looking for suffering in love or even the torture of impossible love. He considered love, like everything else, nonexistent, simply an unformed, unmaterialized feeling, because love is simply a part of nihilism, and nihilism alone was the essence of everything. To him, Germaine’s presence was delusive, as was her absence. Like everything that surrounded him, she was an illusion. The philosopher made fun of organic fusion in love, metempsychosis, and closeness in love because none of these things existed. For him to philosophize about love he had first to reinvent love, to purify it of the sterility that the idealists had forced onto it. He had to cleanse love of the misunderstandings, the isolation, and the disappointments it faced. According to him every failed love was a sick love—it carried nothing but ugliness. He knew that Germaine was ugly, but her ugliness was a form of beauty particular to her. After having slept with her countless times, he forgot her ugliness and even got used to it. What did belief in love bring him other than regret? Love is a lie, and only the nihilism it provokes can be considered real.

  The philosopher did not lack the tactical skills to establish a sharp correlation between truth and deceit. The amazing secret to his behavior was his ability to hide his feelings and to deceive. His primary deceitful attitude was vis-à-vis his wife, whom he did not love and this is where his philosophical game in life begins. Whenever his role as a lover was pure and acceptable, he discarded the minor mistakes he made and the flowery words he uttered. He hid behind and from them, and moved constantly within this closed cycle where he found himself and to which he had become used. Yet he had to find a strategy to deal with Germaine.

  He had to adopt a special system with Germaine. He would show eagerness and compliance whenever she rejected him and disregard her whenever she submitted to him; he would erase her from his imagination and fling her far away. He liked this game and spent time thinking and plotting. He took special pleasure in his thoughts as he formulated and refined them. He looked forward to the morning, when he would apply the ideas conceived the night before. The fact of the matter, though, was that it was not he who planned and plotted, but rather that he executed what Germaine had planned for him. She was very smart and made him believe that he was the master of the situation, that it was he who planned and plotted and had the last word. But it was an illusion. He was manipulated; he was an object not a subject. He had no idea that the decisions he executed were hers, not his.

  Germaine was a dangerous strategist, capable of devising extraordinary plans of great consequence. She knew what she wanted just as much as the philosopher did not know what he wanted. The road to their aspirations led through opposite gates, one distant, the other difficult, complex, and requiring a great deal of effort to reach. In her genius Germaine was able to bring the two gates close enough to be fused into one. She had no intention of revealing her thinking to him, and she never talked with him about what might be her final goal, or ideal, akin to the philosopher’s idealism that he denied. Germaine was not an idealist like him, and the only abstract terms in her vocabulary pertained to geographical locations, such as the northern hemisphere and the equator. Her drive to reach her goal was not insignificant, nor was she stupid or disinterested. She was well aware that the road led either east or west, with no exit in between. She and her husband were different, with different characters. She was exceptionally self-controlled, and her uniqueness was more clearly defined than his. Although they didn’t admit it to one another, they were both aware of their shared tendency to pretend
to possess things they did not have. It was instinctive. Each was aware that the other was not gifted, but Germaine was different from the philosopher because she could distinguish between the logical and the ordinary. This was the so-called experimental French thinking that Germaine understood instinctually. Pretending to ignore the discrepancies would only prolong this situation. Germaine did not confuse matters. She placed everything in its appropriate place. She had weighed matters very carefully and assessed them in a cautious, Cartesian manner. The choice was between, on the one hand, housekeeping in Paris, cleaning the apartments of wage-earners, and submitting to the whims of those whose pockets were bursting with their wealth. The other path led to marriage with the sensitive Middle Eastern fellow enamored of existentialism, an elegant and fashionable man, who belonged to an aristocratic family, and was connected with the Baghdad elite. On top of all that he had a special place in the Eastern City.

  This Cartesian Frenchwoman was faced with a choice between two totally different lives but could select only one. The first option was biological: love or the mere perpetuation of the human race. The second was social and would bring wealth. She chose the latter. She realized the wisdom of her choice when Abd al-Rahman visited her apartment and brought her a huge bouquet. He then asked her timidly, “Do you like escarole?” to which she replied with her head bent in affected embarrassment, “Yes.” At this moment Abd al-Rahman took a bag from the pocket of his black coat, placed it on the table, and poured two glasses of champagne. He adjusted the white rose in his buttonhole, moved to the far end of the room, and took out candles and dishes from the drawer where Germaine kept them neatly wrapped in a piece of cloth. He placed them in front of her and asked, “Germaine, will you marry me?” to which she replied, “I’ll think about it.”

  Germaine didn’t have a negative view of Baghdad. She didn’t find it particularly ugly nor did she suffer from its burning heat or its people who were so different from the French. Abd al-Rahman provided her with a large, luxurious house in Mahallet al-Sadriya, surrounded by trees and a brick wall. His father was the first to bless the house where he expected his grandchildren to be born, those who would perpetuate his name and memory. Abd al-Rahman’s father was convinced of his son’s genius and respected him for his mind, but also because he had married a Frenchwoman. He considered his son’s marriage to a Frenchwoman a distinction that could not be matched. For him it signified that fashionable, brilliant Europe appreciated and respected his son by marrying off one of its daughters to him. He saw it as a family alliance between him and de Gaulle, rather than the mere fact that a young man had met a woman in Paris while studying there and brought her home. His father therefore busied himself furnishing the house to suit the tastes of his son’s French wife. He was determined to provide her with everything and did not want to appear stingy. She, on the other hand, was annoyed by his excessive generosity and his continuous intrusions into their lives, yet she accepted his help and showed appreciation and respect for his feelings.

  Germaine liked this strange, oriental-looking Mahalleh district with its narrow winding streets. In the souk she felt like a tourist in the city she had read about, the Baghdad of the One Thousand and One Nights. She imagined herself a Christian prisoner locked in her quarters by an oriental prince. She had to compartmentalize her thinking: one mode of thinking was incredibly sarcastic; the other allowed her to pretend to experience nausea, in order to please her husband. She was able to hide her sarcasm during the first year of their marriage, and so the time passed without major incident. She pleased her husband’s existential tastes in various ways. This lasted until she gave birth in Paris to twins, a girl and a boy. When she called her husband and anxiously asked him what he wanted to call the children, he told her, “call the boy Abath (Absurdity) and the girl Suda (Nothingness).” When he translated the meaning of the names, she slammed the receiver and broke down crying. She felt the loneliness she had known before and realized that the mind she had split in two had rejoined itself.

  She was vexed and disgusted, even angry, but she controlled herself because she was well aware that her husband was serious and inflexible. She realized that an existentialist is truly obsessed, and even sick, with no hope of a cure. Her punishment for him was to put an end to her affected nausea when she returned to Baghdad. She neither cared for his philosophy nor for him. She lived her life with total disregard for existentialism. She was totally cured and concentrated her efforts on raising her children to prevent them from becoming like their father, making sure that they did not become fanatical believers in anything. In order to take proper care of her children she needed to take care of herself and her health. She took extreme care of her skin, her hair, and her figure, remaining slim and agile, exercising every day, eating at regular hours, and taking hot baths. She was obsessed with the European fear of aging, of death, and anything reminding her of death, sickness, or the gradual disintegration of the body.

  There was no room for the philosopher in his own house. There was no nausea or any other external manifestation of existentialism. Germaine left everything behind in Paris. For Abd al-Rahman, love with a woman devoid of philosophy was meaningless. So he was compelled to search for his nausea elsewhere, which naturally led him to Sherif and Haddad’s bar on al-Rashid Street and the Café Brazil. But at night, his nausea only manifested itself at the Grief Adab nightclub and with its owner, the dancer Dalal Masabni.

  4

  Dalal was a Christian dancer who had received her training in Beirut from one of al-Hamra Street’s most famous dancers. Although she experienced nausea, especially when she was in the company of the philosopher, she also suffered from a malaise, a sickness of the century. The philosopher told her that she had a Chateaubriand air, but the truth is that she was young and seductive. Frankly, although Dalal was intensly attracted to Hadoub’s virility, she was just as attracted to the philosopher’s open pocket.

  Dalal felt compelled to accommodate her customers by sharing their feelings, so each time she slept with the philosopher she confessed to a strong feeling of nausea. This attracted the philosopher to her, especially because his wife’s feeling of nausea had disappeared since she had returned from Paris. He explained his wife’s condition by saying that Baghdad lacked the existential atmosphere that in Paris fostered such pure philosophical sensations.

  When Abd al-Rahman asked his wife to explain why she experienced such an intense nausea in Paris but none at all in Baghdad, she smiled and said, “Simply put, I had not lost my strong existential feeling then.” This compelled the philosopher to look for someone else because he couldn’t bear the idea of an individually experienced nausea. He used to compare the nausea to a kiss that has to be shared by a man and a woman. Germaine and he had stopped having sex, especially after the birth of the twins, Abath and Suda. When one day he insisted on his rights she shouted in his face, “I am raising your Abath and Suda, so deal with your nausea alone. This is a fair division of labor. You did not worry about Abath, who caught German measles, or Suda, who didn’t stop crying for two days. I spent a whole day in Dr. Simon Bahlawan’s clinic. So take your nausea elsewhere and leave me in peace.”

  He did not appreciate her critical arguments at all, which shed doubt on all aspects of existentialism, against his philosophy. He swallowed her attacks calmly and put down Les chemins de la liberté. He rearranged the black-framed eyeglasses that resembled Sartre’s, got dressed, and left in a hurry. He walked down King Ghazi Street just as the street sweeper was pushing the garbage in front of him. He quickened his step to avoid the debris but didn’t make it. Instead, he ended up inhaling the dust and fell victim to an allergy attack. He headed toward the entertainment district, where movie houses advertised films with posters and neon lights. The sight of a yellowing leaf on a branch, a feather on a shop awning, or a fruit peel crushed by pedestrians, left him nauseated. He longed for the change of seasons and for a nausea that combined all his pleasures into a single experience, derived from
all his senses. He hoped for an emotion that would enliven and tickle his mind.

  Abd al-Rahman found great pleasure in his own nausea, but not Sartre’s, as an expression of his complex and muddled feelings. This nausea allowed him his first opportunity to convey what was going on in his little head. Through it he was able to choose, think, and be content, after having spent his childhood and adolescence oppressed, repressed, and unable to express his thoughts freely. Nausea was a new channel through which he could associate sight and smell, two senses that mingled to form one indescribable impression. It flavored an idea, and allowed it to be presented in a uniquely charming way, deep and mysterious. This is the feeling that Abd al-Rahman adopted in his philosophy and named nausea.

  This feeling of nausea was a great mystery to his contemporaries. It mellowed every one of his emotional reactions, which were otherwise characterized by roughness and gibberish. Philosophy was Abd al-Rahmans’s aim, the philosophy he sought and enthralled him. He considered the waiting time for the realization of this objective a philosophical waiting rather than a spontaneous moment. His description of that moment was of a philosophical nature rather than a metaphysical philosophy, one that brought elevated concepts down to earth. It was a philosophy that intermingled with existing earthly matters.