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

by Ali Bader

  The truth is that despite its existential theme, Suhail Idris’s novel in no way matches the nihilistic and profane life of the philosopher of al-Sadriya in the sixties. The writings of Abd Allah Abd al-Dayim and René Habashi published in al-Adab journal in the early fifties lacked a deep existential vision that could refute the philosopher’s vision or even equal it. This is true of Professor Albert Nasri Nader’s lecture at the College of Humanities and Emile Shuwairi’s translations. In any case, the philosopher had strong reservations about those translations and doubted the correctness of Shuwairy’s interpretation of the original text. What could those two scholars add for someone who was able to read Sartre in the original language?!

  By pure coincidence, in a Paris bookstore Abd al-Rahman had found a biography of Sartre the same year he left Baghdad to study for his doctorate. That book was full of photographs of Sartre, members of his immediate and extended families, and some of his friends, and also included a number of childhood photographs. It was in this photograph album that the Iraqi philosopher discovered the close resemblance between himself and the French philosopher: the hairstyle that Sartre never changed and the facial features, except for his glasses and crossed eyes. While he managed to duplicate the black plastic eyeglass frames with thick lenses, he had no way of simulating the crossed eyes. That failure remained a source of aggravation for the philosopher that lasted his whole life. Strangely enough, Sartre’s father looked like Shawkat Amin, Abd al-Rahman’s father, except for the headgear, the stick, and the coat. The philosopher’s mother, Munira al-Hafez, resembled Sartre’s mother as well, and even the philosopher’s maternal uncle could have passed as Sartre’s uncle’s twin brother.

  These discoveries moved the philosopher deeply. Back in his Paris apartment he was overcome by vertigo and fell out of his chair. He suddenly knew that he was destined to be a philosopher and realized that he belonged to a family of philosophers. As such, he was made for thinking, not working, and it fell to him to take those ideas back to his homeland.

  His epiphany led him to surrender completely to the precepts of existential philosophy and to vow total allegiance to the philosopher’s life. These feelings were compatible with his conceptions of his childhood and adolescence, in which he saw his parents as two great and mighty gods—handsome, heroic, pure, and wealthy—who looked after him and shielded him from his weaknesses and narcissism and saw to it that he grew up strong and able to confront the external threats of society. But as soon as their vigilance weakened, he became aware that his parents were not all he had imagined them to be and that there were other gods more beautiful, more powerful, and wealthier. It was as if he had fallen from the heights and discovered that familial love was a huge deception. At this early stage of confusion he only found solace in his thoughts or, worse, emptiness. His reaction was to invent a legend in which he was a child rescued and adopted by an unknown family nobler and purer than the parents who raised him. He held the woman who tucked him into bed in the cold winter nights to be his adopted mother; likewise with the man who acted as his father. He thought of himself as an illegitimate child.

  This make believe opened up a dream world filled with strange stories that inclined him toward greater secrecy about his private life. He turned into an unmanageable child who got his way by shouting and lying. He became insatiable in every enterprise he undertook and in the sensual pleasures he sought. The changes all took place after he discovered the true nature of his parents’ relationship when spying on them through their bedroom as they made love. It was mainly his father’s role in his life that remained problematic for him and which had led to bouts of nausea since childhood. Thus, existentialism for the philosopher was not the result of formal education but rather had been deeply ingrained in him from his very beginnings—it was a pure existentialism, realized in the minute details of his private life.

  37

  Abd al-Rahman hated his mother mercilessly. His hatred was evident in his passion for the forbidden and his propensity for violence and rage. His mother had been a model of gentleness, and she was closest to his heart, almost a miraculous creature in his eyes. But her quiet, affectionate nature was stripped away by her son’s violence and his inclination to hurt himself and thus torture her. He wanted to face her as a suffering child. In his dreams his mother would torture him to get him to confess that he had been spying on her in her bedroom. She would cut off his head, shave it bald, and cast it away from atop a cliff.

  His indiscretion was unknown except to the few servants who pulled him out of the mud into which he had fallen after leaving the house one rainy night. His hatred for his mother and father festered from that day on. He didn’t want to feel that he was the offspring of a sinful union, thickly encrusted in blood, because it is foul and disgusting. In his eyes, his mother and father lying in bed together was tantamount to true adultery. Whenever he traveled with his father by carriage through the Jewish quarter of Baghdad he would be overpowered by the feeling that his father had brought him there in order to throw him to the bloodsuckers in this dirty ghetto, where thousands of Jews lived in narrow, winding streets. The putrid smell of decay, blood, and offal rose from the ditches. The odor was just like that of their lovemaking, the same smell he had noticed through the door, opened just a crack, to his parents’ bedroom.

  38

  It all happened on a cold rainy evening when his mother carried him to his bed, covered him with sheets and blankets, and told him the story of the lizards that roam the halls of the house at night. She was trying to lull him to sleep, promising to give him things he liked, but he soon realized that his mother was preoccupied by other matters and was in a hurry to bid him goodnight. He saw a twinkle in her eye and a twitch in her face as she fibbed to him. He pretended to fall asleep, and as soon as his mother was reassured, she rushed to her room. He got out of bed and went to his parents’ bedroom.

  When he peered into their room he saw his mother’s naked body move on the bed and his father squeezing her breasts in his hands. They were feverishly engaged in lovemaking, and the sight was nauseating to him. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. As she moaned with pleasure, his mother’s voice sounded repugnant to him. He covered his ears.

  He rushed down the stairs, threw open the main door, and ran into the garden shouting hysterically. He was haunted by the image of his mother, her face drained of innocence. She was fading away like a squeezed pimple. She was a devil chasing him. He slipped and fell and lay in the mud, where the servants later found him and carried him home on their shoulders, water and mud dripping from his clothes.

  In the morning all three ate breakfast together, but his mother avoided his eyes and did not talk to him, in an effort to ignore the events of the previous night. When his father went to parliament, his mother stayed in the living room to enjoy the morning sun, but Abd al-Rahman ignored her and avoided talking to her. The tension lasted a whole week.

  The boy was withering away, and his nausea persisted, especially when he remembered the horrible sight he had witnessed that night. His mother, Munira al-Hafez, would go down to the living room where he was sitting on the couch near the window staring at the thick trees in the garden. As soon as she got close to him, with her blond hair pulled up, fair skin, pure white face, beautiful neck, and colored winter clothes, he would rush away to his room.

  At the end of that week she could no longer bear being shunned by her son. She went to his room, hesitant at first, and switched on the light. He didn’t move and kept his head buried in the pillow. Then he peeked at her furtively, his beautiful black eyes full of tears. He asked her in a hoarse voice, “What do you want?” then quickly hid his face in the pillow and cried loudly.

  Standing at his bed, she replied, “I want to know what’s wrong with you?”

  He told her, “You know.”

  “I want to hear it from you,” she insisted.

  She sat on the bed and toyed with her diamond ring, her head bent. He turned to her, “You d
o know, don’t lie.”

  She repeated, “I am not lying, but I want to hear it from you.”

  He shouted his reply, hardly able to breathe, “Hear what? Do you want me to tell you what you were doing with him?”

  Munira al-Hafez was unable to persuade him. She was embarrassed by his demeanor but kept on trying to talk with him. She finally said, “When you grow up you’ll understand,” but he interrupted her, blurting out without looking at her, “I am old enough, old enough!”

  “My son . . . ,” she said, but she was overcome by a crying fit and couldn’t finish her sentence. He hastened to repudiate their relationship, “I’m not your son. I’m not your son.”

  “How can you say that? You are my son. You are old enough to differentiate between a husband and a stranger. He is my husband and your father,” she said. The boy was still in denial.

  “He’s not my father, I don’t know him.”

  Still his mother insisted, “You don’t have the right to say that. He is your father.” Abd al-Rahman kept on denying his connection to his parents until a strong crying fit interrupted him and he hid his face with the feather pillows.

  This exchange between mother and son went on for a long time, with the boy denying the paternity of his parents and asking to be returned to his biological parents. “You’re not my parents, you’re criminals, you took me away from my real parents and you must return me to them.”

  Nothing Munira al-Hafez said could convince him or stanch his anger, yet she kept at it, “It is natural, accepted by religion and life in general. Ask around you—the servants, anyone. It’s normal.”

  Still he remained hostile, “Don’t lie. The servants will talk about you the way they talk about Rujina.”

  The mother felt defeated and said to him, “Do you compare me to Rujina?”

  “You are the same,” he said, “I don’t want to stay here. I want to leave. What do you want from me?”

  His mother was furious. She asked, “Even if we were not your parents, how do you think you were brought into this world?”

  He replied, “Through some other means, different from this shameful way.”

  Finally, sadly, she was convinced that there was no talking to him. She left his room and went downstairs completely shattered. Overwhelmed, she soon broke down sobbing. When her husband returned from work and saw her in that state, he was very angry and immediately went to his son’s room. He tried to talk to him, but in vain. He tried to convince him but failed. The boy did not utter a word in his father’s presence.

  39

  The philosopher’s life thereafter was in some ways a reaction to what he considered his mother’s false purity. He was compelled to seek out all of the basest feelings and most sordid practices. In the Jewish quarter, a rather intimidating place for him, he found many things that fed his passions and inflamed his imagination and emotions. He went there with the servants—the groom, the carriage driver, and the gardener. It was a kind of purgative, a certain attachment to wild, tainted beauty. He saw beauty in the cats on garbage dumps and stray dogs covered with mud on rainy days. He liked watching the rats come out of the gutters and the donkeys driven by ruffians, and he found it all very attractive. He sought those sights during his evening walks in his grandfather’s opulent gardens that stretched to the surrounding villages. He was searching for a balance in his life and a way that would teach him how to weigh matters and judge others.

  The pure woman in Abd al-Rahman’s life was replaced by dissolute women, the innocent woman by experienced women. He abandoned his imagination to obscene feminine traits, making scullery maids the major players in his life. He shared his mother’s disgust for his father’s addiction to alcohol, but he was disgusted with both of them for their bedroom relationship. He found the drunkenness of the carters and the obscene relationship between the carriage driver Saadun and the housemaid Rujina purer, deeper, and stronger than that of his parents. In his eyes Rujina was the ideal feminine person, despite her sluttish behavior. He became attached to her; she represented sin by excellence. All the others—the teamsters, drivers, thieves, servants, watchmen, and especially the gutter cleaners—he felt were the greatest beings to have emerged from the dregs of the earth. He contrasted his parents’ clean clothes and elegance with the filthiness of the workers and concluded that their squalor was due to idleness. He felt an odd sexual attraction to what he saw as their mysteries and oddities. He saw them as primitive animalistic creatures, nobler somehow than his sanitary family members.

  40

  Abd al-Rahman’s mother had a quiet beauty. She was fair skinned, white as cotton, but she had now lost much of her attractiveness and looked sad because of her son and his odd behavior. She was desperate. She loved her husband and never thought of any other man. She would have lived as the sole mistress in this big house were it not for the presence of her motherin-law, a haughty Turkish woman who shared her authority. She made great concessions in order to live with her kind husband, who respected his parents and listened to their advice. He, too, loved his wife. Under the spell of her beauty, he liked to spend time in her company. She spent most of her days, especially the afternoons, in the living room near the sunny window, working on her embroidery.

  As a child Abd al-Rahman used to walk behind his mother or sit facing her on his father’s lap, admiring her clear eyes that were so full of energy and her beautiful clothes. Much of that disappeared after she became ill and her beauty faded.

  41

  Abd al-Rahman’s relationship with his mother turned harsh, and he responded rudely to her affection and entreaties. The sight of the intimate life of his parents had warped the philosopher’s behavior, his individual weaknesses, and his passive-aggressive inclinations. The result was frequent escapades, chaotic sexual conduct, much pain, and a sustained attitude of revolt. He was haunted by nightmares that continued throughout his adolescence. He would see himself dismembered and left lying on asphalt streets. His childhood was transformed into a valley of tears, dissatisfaction, and crying every time his mother spoke to him. He attacked his father with a kind of hysteria at the slightest sign of affection, and their relationship became very strained. He had an innate inclination for existentialism and so gradually turned into a drunk philosopher, a Don Juan who changed partners frequently, a hedonist who enjoyed life more than he would have had he chosen the moral path, as had his peers among the aristocratic families.

  42

  The first woman to awaken his sexual instincts was Rujina the maid. She was cleaning the marble stairs one morning. He stood in front of her and raised his arms for her to carry him. She squeezed his head between her breasts, where he smelled her natural sexuality, then put him down and caught him gently between her thighs. The experience left him dizzy. He sat down on a couch in the living room and closed his eyes for a few minutes. When he opened them he saw Rujina sweeping the floor, her dark, full thighs purposely uncovered. He was overcome with a deep sexual desire that drove him upstairs to his room. When he reached the door he took another look at the lower floor and saw Rujina’s dark, lustful eyes staring at him. The fullness of her breasts was evident from her cleavage, and her dress was pulled up above the knees. She winked at him as he went into his room.

  43

  Rujina had come to the house after Abd al-Rahman’s mother fired the previous maid. Saadun brought her, and it gradually emerged that he had a relationship with her. The philosopher’s father learned of their relationship but didn’t mind as long as it didn’t interfere with their work.

  Rujina came from a Christian village north of Mosul. It was a rather primitive place, but she was not lacking in taste and refinement. She transformed the house into an impeccably clean and attractive residence. When he learned of her relationship with Saadun, Abd al-Rahman became attached to her. He was attracted by sinful urges that he found fascinating. He wanted to spy on her while she was in the bathroom or in her bedroom. He wanted to savor that body that had stirred something i
n him the day he watched her as she was cleaning the stairs.

  Her eyes disturbed him and made it impossible for him to look straight at her. He cared more for her than he did for his own mother. He wanted to forget the horrible sight he had spied in his parents’ bedroom. He wanted to regain his state of grace without sin. He began establishing a comparison between his mother’s lovemaking with his father, a sin in his eyes, and Rujina’s sinful life. He became enamored of the evil spirit, the evil and sin, when he heard Rujina’s seductive story about her adulterous relationship in Talkif, her village.

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  Rujina was the daughter of Yusif, the owner of a bar on the outskirts of the village. She had been in love with Yaqo since adolescence, and he used to take her to a distant walnut tree to mess around. She was completely seduced by this son of a thief, whose father had come to Talkif thirty years ago from the village of Inshki. He bought large plots of land between Talkif and Betnaya. When he was murdered, his only son, Yaqo, inherited all his property. The young man was handsome but cruel and heartless, and intent on exercising his control over all the inhabitants of Talkif. If any one of them became too powerful, Yaqo bought up his property and threw him out of the village.