The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  with ramadan came the first real signs of deterioration. Fear and a profound anxiety in the patients’ cobwebbed minds resurrected the powerful hold of prostration and resignation in what was a heavy and cruel centuries-old routine. Though the season’s light was familiar to everyone — blinding at times, with an unbearable heat — we all lost ourselves within it. When dusk came like a breath that lasted until darkness settled in, my own sun — pitiful shattered mirrors, pieced back together — fell in ruins around me, trapping me in unanswered questions. A prisoner of the hospital or my body, stripped of everything, even my memory; I once had the power to mold myself out of clay as I wished, in the blood of stars and legends, in the flavor of a thousand springs and gentle winters filled with songs and nursery rhymes since buried in secret creases; I slept and woke with frightening feelings of inconsistency and dread, of being torn apart, of no longer being guided by a logical thread. My descent into the muddy ruts of day and night cruelly reproduced a distorted, gruesome image of victory and freedom.

  Regardless of where I look, even in the depths of my sleep, I see nothing but men decaying faster than ever before. It’s not just disease wearing them down. A new curse — is that the right word? — gnaws at their livers, hearts, arteries, and testicles, permanently tattooing their yellow pupils with a gaze even more distraught than that of a child who no longer has a childhood; disoriented, walking, or staggering in a spatial plane without bearing or direction, they stop, hesitant, suddenly blind, asking themselves if they should double back, advance, or remain motionless — like scarecrows abandoned in the middle of a vast empty field — then, spurred on by a sudden burst of energy, harried by the heat emanating from the thousand mouths of hell, they take refuge under their sheets, hidden away, festering, sticky with sweat that’s far worse than any ordinary fever, haunted by nightmares, mouths opened, throats wheezing, ignoring or unaware of the gray flies stuck to their eyelashes, teeth, and tongues. Their misery — more crushing than a death multiplied over and over, a failed death, reviving itself with all the cruelty of a rusted knife — is well and truly the misery of a devout believer no longer able to answer to God’s whims.

  I don’t want to trap myself inside the idea of an inevitable and suicidal unhappiness. I cling to the freedom of the cloud — an uncertain freedom subject to the vagaries of the wind — a freedom that sometimes forms and dissipates so quickly that I barely have time to make out a mountain or an immense tortured face, a detail hurriedly torn from a fresco that looks like Guernica or a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Now that I think about it, my most distant memories — as lifelike as my spider dreams — go back to those timeless days when, stretched out on the veranda of my childhood home (the house with slatted shutters forever closed) or perhaps in the distant and legendary Anonymous Hills where I spent my vacations with my grandmother Yamna, my eyes drunk with infinity, my small selfish heart, avoiding the daily worries and fears of ordinary men (insufficient food, lack of money, diseased animals, drought, or simply a sales slump at the weekly souk), didn’t imagine clouds auguring good weather, but rather mobile structures drawn with nervous, careless brushstrokes: pagodas, cathedrals, Saharan casbahs, minarets pierced with wooden stakes emerging from the skies over Asia, the West, or perhaps an Incan America, or from more familiar skies above Timbuktu or a sandstorm-struck Smara. Sometimes, the fruits of my nocturnal terrors would also stretch from one end of the horizon to the other: impossible giants, made of water and thunder, with the wings of a thousand birds, beaks and talons gleaming, and rainbows, crowns, and sabers from universal mythologies, or else forbidden, bloody kingdoms of laughing, grimacing, or serene deities, rotting since time immemorial under apocalyptic hurricanes, tropical vegetation crawling with wart-covered monsters, and living dunes carved from colossal rocks on which tenacious erosion will never take hold.

  Impossible to escape my current condition for long. My visions quickly disappear as the men in white enter; they materialize amid the howls of an enraged pack, envious of our prerogatives as infidel worshipers of fire or false idols, mark the occasion by calling us — these are their favorite insults — happy miscreants disrespectful of the ancestral religion. Their jokes on the first day of Ramadan rarely vary, something like “Come on, you gluttons, stand up, prepare your butt cheeks!” or else, “No luck today, nothing but roasted chicken and pastilla!” and they roar with laughter each time a shriveled old man, shy or ashamed, nervously but persistently inquires whether our medications, liquid or pill, will unavoidably violate his fast. Nothing surprises me anymore, not since my conversation with the head nurse who offhandedly told me, in a bored and jaded tone, that dozens of patients would die during this “sacred month.” “Listen to me, young man, no matter what the suited up muftis on television say nowadays, medicine and religion are incompatible. Let them come take a look here themselves, they’ll see toilet stalls strewn with hastily discarded pills, not to mention everything that’s been flushed down to the sewers!”

  “But can’t you tell the sick what kinds of risks they’re taking?”

  “What, you think you can tell a frog that by jumping into the water, he’s still not safe from the rain?” Not expecting an answer, the head nurse walked away, his gurney squeaking between the beds, putting an end to silent prayers and perplexed expectations.

  The most incredible thing to occur during this period, so favorable to somber thoughts, happened at noon on a Friday. The table was set as usual on the veranda. I’d taken a seat between Rover and Guzzler, alongside the other patients, whom I divided into two categories: the ones who’d accepted taking their medicine and sat down with us solely to escape their solitude as they waited for the sunset call to prayer by the muezzins who would authorize them to break their fast; and those, less numerous, who had found peace of mind in the concessions granted to followers who lack access to water to perform their ablutions (a stone suffices for purification), to pregnant or menstruating women, and even to the dying man unable to voice his profession of faith (a close relative or a neighbor witnessing this final hour can proclaim it in his stead). The latter group, armed with arguments that left an ashy aftertaste, ate resolutely and wildly, repeating to those listening that God, in his infinite mercy, never denies anyone from paying his debt at a later date, to which certain of the residents usually retorted: “And if you died right now with your mouth full?”

  “Well in that case,” the surly food-stand owner answered one time, “you can help yourself to my spot in paradise and set up a grocery store there while you’re at it.”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, blaspheming at your age!” said the teacher-lookalike, who was sitting apart from the others, buried in a magazine.

  And Guzzler, between two mouthfuls: “You know, it’s been a long time since I gave two shits about ending up in your camphor-filled paradise. I don’t want to die of boredom amid schoolmasters and somber theologians.”

  “Well, the flames of Gehenna have been waiting for your kind for a long time too!”

  “What do I care, as long as I’m hanging out with Brigitte Bardot and the stars of Hollywood!”

  On the Friday I want to mention, nearly identical comments were being exchanged between those with mouthfuls of food and those without, in the perfect cordiality of dogs and cats, when a rock landed in the middle of our plates with a deafening crash. Women and young girls, transformed into harpies, gesticulated in our direction and spit out inaudible insults from the balconies and wide-open windows of the neighborhood buildings adjacent to the hospital wall; next to them, kids, delighted at their good luck, amused themselves by throwing stones at us, their joy exploding in a thunderous clamor when they hit their target. The rocks knocked over chairs, spilled plates, and shattered water glasses, and forks and spoons fell to the ground. After this altercation, we decided to move the table inside. Several windowpanes were smashed to bits and, despite taking shelter inside the hospital, we could still hear them shouting i
nsults. It was impossible for me to get used to this world’s angry and defeated face.

  ramadan came to a close at the end of a labyrinthine dream and the days returned to an unremitting sameness. In the dream, I was relentlessly haunted by the idea that the dead don’t exist except within us. After running for so long, a glowing fire burned in my lungs and my legs could no longer support me. Thousands of insects fluttered through my night like seagulls, which only I was able to hear. But this time, the insects were visible, I could even feel them in my hair, hopping on tiny clawed feet. Stretched out among clumps of weeds, amid the smell of open graves, I knew that I was in a cemetery, which didn’t bother me at all. I tried to control my breathing, inhaling air through my nostrils and exhaling through my mouth, quietly, at calculated intervals; but the biggest surprise, in this dream, was that I was able to recognize the different butterflies that my naked body attracted like a light: Urania, Vanessa, Bombyx, Argus, Machaon, and Phalene specimens, countless teeming larva, and caterpillars, in a nasty swarm. “This muck has been feeding on our rot,” said the old man, my companion from the bastards’ resurrection. I don’t know how I recognized him since his face was covered in pieces of rank flesh. He knelt down in front of me with a kettle full of water and casually began performing his ablutions, not at all bothered by the maggots raining down around him as a result of his deliberate movements. He continued, “Goodness, Ramadan almost got me this year.” Hysterical laughter rose in my throat, followed by a cough that nearly strangled me. “Are you making fun of me, you little beggar?”

  “No, not at all,” I responded. “So you’re saying Ramadan follows us through eternity?”

  “What eternity?” sighed the old man.

  When I got to the end of the dream, it was almost dark outside. Behind the broken windowpanes, the fading light wavered between a faded pink and the sepia of an ancient photograph. A strange and inexplicable force drove me away from my bed. I went out into the cold. Rover, seated on a bench not far from Wing C, legs tucked under his chin, wasn’t moving. His pajamas were soaked in dew. It’s not possible, I must still be dreaming. Rover looked up as I got closer. “No, you’re not dreaming. Not anymore. I’m not part of your dreams.” I understood even less. How had he heard what I was thinking? And what was he talking about anyway? What a harebrained idea, that he wasn’t a part of my dreams, as if it were possible to enter and exit someone else’s dream. It was definitely Rover talking to me, but in an exceptionally serious and solemn tone. Most people, faced with situations that are beyond them, will react in their own way: they’ll light a cigarette to gather their composure, or burst into laughter, or perhaps close their eyes, or, better yet, run away. But I found nothing more comforting than pissing at the base of the nearest tree. Rover kept on talking behind me: “I lied to you the other day, I don’t know why actually. Maybe it’s true, what that bastard Guzzler always says, that lying’s become my second nature.”

  I turned around: “What did you lie to me about? Your mother? I had my suspicions, you know.”

  “What I told you is from at least two years ago. My mother had ‘really’ died and the hospital administration gave me permission to go to the funeral. I was terribly afraid that day, afraid of taking the bus and attending the burial, and one of the most absurd thoughts got stuck in my head, which seemed unshakably logical at the time: if ever I was dumb enough to rush to the house, my mother’s death would become definitive the second I laid eyes on her body. So, on that day, without knowing how — I must have looked like a sleepwalker or a crazed junkie — I found myself in a dark movie theater (impossible to know which one it was now); despite my state, I recognized Jerry Lewis on the screen; he was talking to a doll, speaking so tenderly and so sadly that time eventually evaporated. As if by magic, my pain disappeared, the people around me had left too, and in the silence of the roar of projectors or fans, I was no longer conscious of the distance separating me from the screen — there could no longer be any distance since I was ‘on’ the screen next to Jerry Lewis; he was talking to me and I was crying even though I was only a rag doll with long rabbit ears and bear paws . . . Everything I told you after that is true, including the moment that I spit on the old creep.” He stopped talking. I didn’t say anything. I sniffled. I was so confused that instead of screaming to wake myself up under the warmth of my blankets, my hand grabbed a pack of cigarettes from my pajama pocket; I shook it so that one came out, and then handed it to Rover. When you’re dreaming in spite of yourself, knowing there’s no point in losing your patience when time has no meaning, and that it’s not unpleasant to drift along, you quickly discover the principle of slow motion. In the moment between grabbing a cigarette from the pack and lighting it, a locomotive whistled in the distance, a dog barked and, as the crowing of a flock of roosters pierced a dawn growing bigger millimeter by millimeter, our reality — the anodyne reality of two friends smoking cigarettes, sitting next to each other on a hospital bench — took on the consistency of the curls of smoke escaping from our lips. I had to clear my throat twice before I could make an audible sound. I barely recognized my voice, which was saying: “If what you told me the other day actually happened two years ago, where were you during the twenty-four hours you were gone?”