by Fouad Laroui
Over the course of their walk, several such phrases formed in his head. “What am I doing here?” She was an old acquaintance, to whom he no longer even paid attention. The anxieties of adolescence…Yes, granted, no one knows why they are thrown into this (“cruel,” of course) world, we can lie to ourselves, believe in endless rubbish, imagine ourselves chosen, invent gods and great designs, but at the root of it all, we don’t know anything. So what? What does it matter if life does or doesn’t have meaning, as long as it has flavor? Another inscription surged from who knows where: “Who is this woman next to me?” Oh, he could have filled out a police report, he knew her name, her birthday, certain details that might be of interest for an anthropomorphic survey—and after? Would he have exhausted her? “It’s been a while since you wore her out.” Who said that? What boor? In the curve of a path, he had seen these words: “One must know how to end a strike.” Curiously, the phrase was written in French; it took him a few moments to recognize it. Yes, it was the phrase that Annie had taught him, one of those quotations she had forced him to repeat, the good history professor, “because France is that, too, not just monuments and nice little meals, but also proclamations, slogans engraved into the French imagination and which now form a part of our soul, our collective unconscious—to understand us, you must learn them by heart…”—but where did that declaration come from? Ah yes, that former communist leader—John furrowed his brow—who? Yes, Maurice Thorez: “One must know how to end a strike.” But why did he think of that? What was the connection? The words started to dance, then to glimmer and he saw that now they were saying something else: “One must know how to end a relationship.” Who is speaking? Are they giving me an order? A piece of advice? Is it me talking to myself? In a language other than my own? Bizarre…
Their steps had carried them toward the museum of the Cinquantenaire. They stopped a moment to look at the great building, somber and solemn. They found themselves climbing up the majestic steps quite naturally. John mumbled something, she nodded yes and he went to buy two tickets. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself.
They walked through the rooms exchanging a few formulaic phrases. (“It’s incredible how rich this museum is! —Yes…Why isn’t it better known? You never hear anyone talk about it. Did you see those marble statues? —Fabulous!”) Little by little, the phrases became less conventional, or else they took on a new meaning, as the museum closed in on them and its richness took on an extraordinary effect. The Mosaïque de la Chasse from Apamée in Syria, which the guide specified “came from the palace of the governor of Syria Secunda, a Roman province,” left them speechless. Annie summed it up in one of her reflections that she sometimes made aloud and regretted just as soon, qualifying them herself as “Poujadist.”
“I say, well, the governor of Syria Secunda did all right for himself!”
She had had to explain the word poujadiste to John a few months earlier…
The bronzes of Lorestan gave John an opportunity to speak of his time backpacking through Iran during his studies. “It was before the ayatollahs…” Annie remembered she had admired the beautiful samples at the Cernuschi museum in Paris.
“Samples of the ayatollah?”
“No, nitwit, of the bronzes!”
They burst out laughing, nervously, then became serious again, he a bit melancholic, she on the verge of tears. To get a hold of herself, she started reading aloud entire phrases from the guide. Since they were alone in the museum, she felt like she was strolling through an immense palace, as if it were their home. Her home. “The Egyptian collection contains more than eleven thousand pieces,” she read. She showed him the “Dame de Bruxelles,” then the relief of Queen Tiyi. He nodded his head without teasing her about her very recent knowledge. “The Roman collections are structured around a few important oeuvres: remarkable Etruscan mirrors, marble busts of the imperial epoch…” Leaning over the immense model of Rome, they showed each other, with their fingers, the monuments they recognized.
“That will be our next trip!” exclaimed Annie rashly—then she bit her lip.
In another room, they saw icons, silks, Coptic textiles, and Byzantine ceramics.
“Mais c’est Byzance…” Annie murmured mechanically.
John approached her.
“What did you say?”
Annie hesitated a bit then turned toward him and taught him the expression she had heard so often in her childhood. Her grandfather, in Toulouse, would come close to the table during parties, a big smile lighting up his emaciated face that had known so many hardships and he would exclaim, full of sun and kindness: “Mais c’est Byzance!”
“How would you say that in Dutch?”
He started to think.
“Het is de hoorn des overvloeds, maybe. But there’s probably a better translation. I’ll think about it…”
The Vietnamese ceramics, the Khmer sculptures, the drums from Laos plunged John into his childhood haunted by echoes of the war in Indochina on the radio…An imposing sculpture, brought from Easter Island, lured them toward a somber corner of the museum. Speechless, they lingered for several minutes before the menacing colossus without realizing they had drawn nearer to each other and were almost touching. The neighboring rooms presented the Inca, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations. Annie leaned in and read the texts diligently. John preferred to look first at the objects at length, then throw a rapid glance at the little cards glued to the displays. Annie murmured:
“…the feather-working art of the Indians of the great Amazon forests…”
She burst out laughing. John started to smile and looked at her, intrigued.
“No, it’s nothing, it’s a word that made me laugh: plumassier. I don’t know it. It made me think of plumard. L’art du plumard…Bed art…It’s funny.”
John didn’t laugh. “Vind je dit grappig?” He saw the words float before his eyes with the French translation: “Et vous trouvez ça drôle?” which he knew because one day Annie had made him listen to a sketch by Coluche which had ended in those words. Again another thing that didn’t work: she never laughed at his witticisms. By the time he explained them, dissected them, they had obviously lost all their appeal. “You’re terribly serious, you don’t have a sense of humor…” Petra and Mieneke, on the other hand, had appreciated his deadpan humor, the little absurdities he delivered with a very serious air. Again, it was necessary first to understand them…
Inside the museum, he discovered a Gothic cloister. They sat for a moment on the cold stone. They had promised, one day, at the beginning of their adventure, to visit all the cloisters in all the abbeys of Europe… “A vast undertaking.” “Yes, I know, I was waiting for that,” thought John, hearing the voice of de Gaulle whispering his words to him. “I’ll go alone to the cloisters,” Annie said to herself, “maybe I’ll put on a little black veil, they’ll think I’m a penitent…” She pulled herself together. “What do I have to atone for? This is nuts! There’s a part of me that feels guilty…” They left the cloister, took a wrong turn and found themselves in an immense room of pre-Columbian art. They were standing looking at a sort of miniature totem pole when John suddenly felt himself assailed by a tide of colors and sounds. Words formed in his head, it was as if he were a spectator looking on as it happened, and he distinctly heard his voice pronounce this phrase, in French:
“Annie, I’m sorry but it’s over between us.”
Immediately he felt a chasm open beneath his feet. No! He wanted to take back his words but it was impossible. The words were no longer there, there were only garish images, colors, echoes that bored into his skull. Terrified, he turned toward Annie but she was no longer at his side. Feverishly, he looked around the big room then saw her in the distance, her back to him. She was on the other side of the room, frozen before a display. He approached her, wondering how she had managed to walk away without him hearing. He touched her shoulder, she gave a start and turned around, shaken, shocked, looking haggard. But it was impossible, she cou
ldn’t have heard him. Why this fright, then? He noticed a sort of gray mummy in the display. It was a terrifying skeleton, an adolescent embalmed in a strange position, as if crouching. His bones were distinctly visible, one could make out the pieces of skin now turned to leather, one could surmise his gaze in his sunken eye sockets. Annie nestled herself in John’s arms and started to cry.
Now they were too tired to go admire the glassware, the stained glass windows, the tinware, and the ceramics the guide promised in the chapel. The lacework, the textiles, the clothing…
“Another time,” she said.
“Yeah,” he responded. “I shall return.”
“Why are you speaking in English?”
“It’s actually a famous saying. It’s what General MacArthur said while leaving the Philippines under the threat of the Japanese, during the war.”
“Do you know how to talk other than in quotations? Do you know that you’re extremely tiring? And for starters, it’s not I shall return but We shall return.”
She had said all that with a lot of tenderness. They returned to the hotel, making a detour to pass under the archway of the Cinquentenaire. This time, in the park, their hands searched for each other, found each other. Back at the hotel, they went to have a drink at the restaurant bar. They decided together to stay there for dinner instead of going to the Grand Place, as John had planned. The waitress was Italian, friendly, and discreet. Annie took a sip of wine and remarked:
“You’re certainly quiet, for once!”
He smiled, took her hands and looked her in the eyes. He said nothing, but the words jostled around in his head.
“Today, I almost lost you…But I realized that all the phrases that brought me toward our separation…toward what I thought was my decision to separate, were not from me…In a certain way, I heard voices. Quotations. Words, collars of sounds that came from I don’t know where. When you were getting on my nerves, I saw phrases appear. ‘What an idiot!’ ‘What am I doing with this woman?’ ‘This relationship isn’t going anywhere.’ ‘Let’s finish it!’ Words…But the important thing is that atrocious feeling of solitude that gripped me in a second when I thought it was over. That was concrete. That was me. My body, my soul, call it what you will…It’s then that I understood, at that precise moment. (By what miracle did you walk away from me when I thought you were by my side?)”
She looked at him with a sardonic air, thinking: “You’ll never know it, but I came to Brussels to break up with you. It’s too complicated, this long-distance relationship. And your hollandais character…sorry, néerlandais. And then, it’s stupid but…It was while looking at that mummy that I said to myself: he is alive. You, I mean…He’s full of faults, obsessions, he gets on my last nerve sometimes, but it’s precisely that which makes him alive. It’s that spark of life, even if it expresses itself through a bad temper, that I’m in love with. I know that now. We will visit all the cloisters of all the abbeys in the world.”
The delicious dishes that came one after another unknotted their tongues. It was almost midnight when they got back to the seventh floor. He stepped aside to let her enter the suite then entered in his turn. He closed the door, softly, almost tenderly, aware that he was entirely inside of this act. And in all those that were to come.
BENNANI’S BODYGUARD
Nagib puts down Le Matin du Sahara, looking preoccupied, subsumes us in his detestation of the world in one glance, and bursts out:
“What are autoimmune diseases?”
Prudently, we keep quiet. The question seems to evoke others. A discussion might break out, medical, mean. It’s hot, Saturday morning, Maure’s cat (the boss’s cat? To whom does this wretched cat belong? And can a cat belong to someone in the first place?), the cat of Café de l’Univers sleeps, rolled in a ball, on a neighboring chair. The passersby pass, hurried, because we are in Casablanca, and not in Tafraoût, and because we must look hurried, even if we have nothing to do, to allay suspicion, to convince others that we’re up to snuff, that we’re true Casablancais, busy, industrious, useful—not like those Marrakchi clowns, who do nothing the livelong day, nothing at all but stare at a big ochre minaret and tell jokes.
The silence thickens like cotton wool soaked with the blood of the poor.
So Nagib changes his tactic. He points his finger at Hamid and repeats his question, which becomes comminatory:
“What are autoimmune diseases?”
Hamid, attacked, first defends himself by pretending to be deaf, then mute, then an idiot, which for him isn’t difficult. But nothing was able to divert the rage of knowledge that had taken hold of Nagib. He repeats his question, louder.
Dadane, who joined us this morning, swoops (half-heartedly) to Hamid’s aid.
“Autoimmune diseases? It would take too long to explain, and would require, in addition, pencils, paper…But, instead, I’ll tell you the story of Bennani’s bodyguard…”
Everyone raises their eyes, even those (Hamid) who earlier had pretended not to have them. Collective astonishment:
“Did you say ‘bodyguard’?”
The Moor draws closer, noting our awakening, sensing consumption. We rapidly order mint teas, a coffee, a Mekka cola.
“Did you say ‘bodyguard’?”
Dadane settles into his cramped chair, clears his throat, takes on a tone of “I’m about to tell you something really amazing,” and jumps in:
“Toward the end of 19**, high school students in the advanced math class in the Lycée Lyautey in Casablanca (I among them) decided to organize a little celebration, to celebrate…to celebrate what, exactly? I don’t remember. But it doesn’t matter…”
“There aren’t that many reasons to be happy, we won’t be finicky. Continue.”
“The students were perhaps commemorating the demonstration of a theorem?”
“Ha ha, very funny…Anyway, they rented a room on Boulevard Mohammed V, a space pompously christened ‘the celebration room’ by the proprietor. In reality it was a type of big hall that took on a festive spirit and whose walls, bounni-colored, oozed despair. The ceiling was strung with large banners that had been placed there for another occasion (the creation of a union) and that someone had forgotten to take down. So what, we would celebrate beneath partisan slogans—it would take more than that to ruin the commemoration of Thales’ theorem.”
“Thales is imperturbable.”
“Irrefutable.”
“Sent to do some reconnaissance, Anouar had accepted the owner’s conditions. He was the one who had described the room to us, but, prudent, he had spoken of pink walls: we didn’t know what the color bounni was. Pink walls! Old Thales would be turning in his grave with glee. Greeks like pink (don’t they?).”
We didn’t respond, we were no Hellenic experts.
“Stocks of drinks were purchased: Coca-Cola, Youki of course, Sim, Sinalco, and other brands that have completely disappeared from the surface of the planet.”
“No alcohol?”
“Yeah, a bit of beer. Discreetly. These were the days when you could drink beer without triggering a heavy fire of fatwas, without provoking questions from Parliament, without upsetting the Pakistanis in the distance.”
“Joyous age!”
“When the day came, we gave ourselves a close shave, perfumed ourselves with a ten-franc Spanish perfume, and walked gaily to the celebration hall to save the price of a bus ticket (1 dirham and 20 centimes). We put on our least shabby clothes, our least dusty shoes, our least nominal ties. Thales’s band traversed Casablanca as if it were a conquered city.”
“The world is ours!”
“After walking for a half hour…We had arrived! But what, what’s going on, the door is closed! We hung around in front of the hall because that imbecile Mourtada had forgotten the key in the pocket of his everyday pants, which he wasn’t wearing today, by definition: he was in his Sunday best, even if it was Friday night. He went running back down Boulevard Ziraoui to look for the key. We waited for him on the sid
ewalk (there was no danger, these weren’t the days when extremists came to blow themselves up in a crowd as soon as they noticed a gathering of more than three people).”
“Happy days!”
“Joyous age!”
“So we wait peacefully, talking about Hilbert spaces and Maxwell’s equations. But…a black BMW pulls up in front of us. Do I need to describe a BMW? It’s a German-made car, particularly well designed and with a powerful engine. It’s a gem of that advanced technique that will always squash the beggar.”
“We know what a BMW is. We’ve seen them. From a distance.”
“Bennani gets out (from the black BMW). Bennani was the rich kid in the advanced math class. Rather nice, intelligent, generous on occasion, his only fault was that he was rich and we weren’t. Normally, all he had to do was appear to send us, by contrast, back to our sad condition of ‘sons of the masses.’ (It was the time when even the sons of the masses could go to the Lycée Lyautey in Casablanca.)”
“Happy days!”
“Joyous age!”
“But that day, he couldn’t outdo us. We were in our best threads. Or rather: our most decent threads. Even our nominal ties could bear the comparison with his satin lavalliere with one dangling button. We felt like we could stand up to Bennani. On this sidewalk where we were loitering, we held our heads high, proud to be as well dressed as he. Dadouche had even borrowed a suit from his cousin. So he took a step toward Bennani, ready to defy the gaze of the nabob math wiz.
“‘Monsieur, we shall fight!’
“‘Duel! Duel!’
“But then out of the BMW came a second man, on the heels of Bennani. And what a man he was! He was a hulk. Huge. Mean. He rolled his large shoulders proudly, showed off a strangler’s hands, and his square jaw quivered menacingly. He was dressed in black and wearing glasses of the same color. Black!”
