The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  This is what Fartface tells me: “It’s undoubtedly not too late for me to make up my mind, for a second or so. I think you’ve understood for a while now that the idea of duration is entirely unpredictable here. I don’t mean to say that time doesn’t exist, that it flows through people on the outside, aging them a little more each second. It’s probably even more present within these high walls surrounding us, so dense and cramped that we can touch it. That’s what’s so terrible. We have the ability to touch time the way you’d touch a consenting thigh. But despite that calculated, automated repetition, day and night, under the sun and moon, we’re possessed by the horrible certitude that the same day, and the same night, are alternating with all the fidelity of a nightmare. I mean, yes — of course! — a flood of small details emerges to make us believe that something’s changed, details so necessary that I’m absolutely certain we would all be mad without them. We’ve been in this hospital — let’s call it that since, in a way, we are being treated here — for years. I can’t count the days because their deceptive number has in fact been reduced to a single day that lasts ‘inside’ of each of us, and that day is a single point that can contain the entire universe, infinity. For all intents and purposes, it’s pretty much like the word that, according to the theologians, encompasses God, a word that is of course impossible to find, and that an eternity wouldn’t suffice to discover. Everyone who’s come here — and you’re one of many — has confused that permanence with boredom. In your somewhat special case, your faculty for dreaming and imagining has shielded you from error. You’ve lived among us without ever really being with us. Your moments, brilliant and fleeting, have tossed you around like a shipwrecked sailor, from one shore to another, from memory to hallucination. But you shouldn’t believe that the patients here consciously know what they’re experiencing. No one’s aware of even the tiniest morsel of truth. And if I bothered to tell them, to expose the terrible mechanism governing this hospital universe, well there’s no doubt about it, nobody would swallow such an absurdity. So I carefully restrain myself. Their hell is already unbearable, living as they are in the expectation of imminent death, waiting that becomes all the more abominable because it takes place amid total inertia. For them, every day that goes by proves their uselessness in life and at the same time reinforces their hope for a better, more merciful tomorrow. So what would be the point in taking away that glimmer, even if it is superfluous? I sense the countless questions jostling in your head. I can’t answer many of them for the simple reason that I don’t know. For the rest, you’ll figure them out yourself, you have enough time, seeing as you’ve decided to stay here. Incidentally it’s that decision — which I don’t understand, but again I’m not here to understand — that prompted me to talk to you like I never have before and never will again. Now that you’re free, I don’t want to know how your good sense will guide you. It’s also possible that your memory will refuse to retain all this. And in that case . . .”

  i no longer remember the exact moment that I stood up and left the room.

  A few stars sparkle in a pale sky. Far away, on a country road, shrill car horns fill the silence, undoubtedly partygoers roaming the night to express a transitory joy. It’s this humid air, I think, that echoes the slightest noise across space. Seeing as it’s going to rain soon, I hurry to get back to my bed. I can hardly see anything as I walk, taking care not to veer off the winding path bordered by tall grass. On my right, Wing A, with its lights off, looms between oak trees that quiver in a breath of wind. I immediately reject the dumb thought that Argan will appear at the entrance. The incredible thing about this hospital is that people never mention the dead — as soon as a lifeless body gets taken to the morgue, no one seems to worry about it anymore. I have yet to overhear a conversation praising the dead, the way you normally would. Apart from Rover — with whom I had a discussion about the old man (in a past that I’m now certain wasn’t real) — I never had the courage to approach anyone and ask about the departed. Truthfully, the fear of confronting my own obvious amnesia always stopped me from satisfying my curiosity. I eventually convinced myself that I am no different from those long-ago voyagers who landed on islands on the fringes of the known world; their curiosity dulled quickly when faced with the impenetrable customs of a people hastily judged at first glance to be primitive and savage. Thankfully the superfluous and quasi-absurd pretension that I am surrounded by animalistic humans has evaporated, leaving behind nothing but a bitter humility, full of confusion and silence.

  When I reach the structure of low, fortified walls that everyone refers to as “the morgue,” I don’t know what compels me to hurry, even more than I did while circling Wing A. All of a sudden, I stop, feeling so ridiculous that I look around me, worried I’m being watched by someone who won’t hesitate to make fun of me. I make out the fleeting glow of a cigarette near the three steps leading to the hallway to Wing C. Nonchalantly, I approach the figure sitting in the cold night. I detect what sounds like a short mocking laugh. The moon, cleared from behind a trail of passing clouds, faintly illuminates the man’s face. I recognize the tall skeleton who, according to Rover, forced his wife and her lover the barber to continue having sex while he watched.

  “It’s funny to see there’s still someone afraid of dead bodies.”

  “I’m not afraid of dead bodies. I’m just cold. Why aren’t you in the main room? They’re having lots of fun inside.”

  The man scowls. His weariness makes him seem vulnerable to me. I climb the three steps and then turn toward him.

  “Why didn’t you have the courage to kill them? A normal man would have made short work of them.”

  His response surprises me: “But I kill them every night. I’m actually starting to get tired of it.”

  He abruptly turns sideways. A small metallic sound reaches me in the silence, like an iron object sliding and falling onto hard ground. The man bends over to pick it up. He’s holding a finely sharpened axe between his two hands.

  “I just chopped them up into pieces again.”

  “I don’t see any blood on the axe.”

  “Why would there be?”

  I stop listening. I enter the wing, feel my way to my bed. The storm erupts. I light a cigarette, I smoke it slowly. From time to time, I flick ashes in the darkness around me. I hear the rain. Fat, warm drops, like the rain that sometimes falls between summer and winter, during autumn, which, for us, passes very quickly. I lean against the wall and close my eyes. A blinding flash of lighting suddenly illuminates the doorframe, neatly revealing the silhouette of the man armed with his axe. I feel him watching me, the gaze of an ordinary man who hacked his wife and her lover to pieces. He takes a few steps in my direction, staggering like a drunk. He stops at the foot of my bed.

  “You’re not afraid?” he asks me.

  “Of what? There’s never any blood on your axe.”

  “That’s true.”

  Very quickly he leaves the room. I open my eyes. Nobody’s there. The rain is forming a sparkling curtain in the doorway. I slide under my blanket, thinking that sleep will consume itself like a burning piece of paper. When there’s nothing but ashes left, I’ll once again wake up in the light of a new day and walk behind the veranda, to the spot where I planted basil leaves at the base of the wall.

  For now I’ll sleep. It makes me smile to think that I imagined a murderer brandishing his axe. Something to scare a child, just a sick child sitting by the fire. Since I’m no longer that child, and I can never be him again, I decide to stop writing. For that matter I have nothing else to say.

  1987–1989

  Translator’s afterword

  before making its way into English, The Hospital was translated into Arabic by the Moroccan writer and journalist Mohammed El Khadiri, whose challenge was to render a text heavy with colloquialisms and slang into modern standard Arabic (MSA), a formal and mostly written version of a language with dozens of regional va
riations. English may be more accommodating of informal speech than literary Arabic — and indeed welcoming to any number of isms (neolog-, regional-, colloquial-) — but nonetheless, for me, translating the dialectal language of Bouanani’s novella demanded particular care and creativity.

  For example, the ubiquitous French conversation starter “Ça va?” “Ça va.” typifies the difficulty in translating Bouanani’s dialogue. Literally, the expression means “It goes?” “It goes.” In other words: “How’s it going?” “Good.” Or: “Okay?” “Okay.” A contemporary equivalent: “Hey, what’s up?” “Nothing.” Or the even more succinct: “Sup?” “Nothin.” The magic — and frustration — of this phatic expression is that it can be and is used in the French-speaking world in just about any situation: a salutation between two prisoners, two neighbors, two new friends, two old friends — there is no equivalent English expression with as much flexibility and nuance.

  On page 102, Bouanani uses the expression to convey the monotony of the hospital setting, as well as the resigned familiarity that develops between its residents. The register here is simultaneously informal and formulaic; the interlocutors respect an understood order and rhythm of speech, and a crescendoing verbal one-upmanship. They “excel at the art of talking without saying anything.”

  Dialogue also allows Bouanani to show off his talent as a cineast with an attentive ear for timing and theatricality. My challenge was to find equivalents for the coarse, acerbic, and sometimes sophomoric speech that Bouanani uses to reveal the social differences among the hospital patients, without caricaturing any of them.

  I took care to avoid the pitfall of inadvertently modernizing the text with contemporary slang (e.g., translating “Ça va?” as “What’s up?”) or creating a forced informality by hewing too closely to the source text. (In the Arabic version, El Khadiri chose to translate this section of the text, as well as other dialogues, into Darija, or Moroccan Arabic.) This type of challenge was compounded by the importance of conveying that Bouanani’s novella is a resolutely Moroccan text, written in standard French but interspersed with regional words and expressions.

  In The Hospital, the landscape of Morocco — its trees, plants, fruits, and animals — stand in for a vanishing precolonial culture, and naming this highly specific landscape in translation demanded research into terminology and etymology. No mere fly caught in a web, but a dipteran doomed by its stupidity; palmipeds whirling through the sky readying for attack; unbridled manchineel and calabash trees.

  The taxonomy of flora and fauna, smells and tastes, saints and legends permeates The Hospital. With amnesia as the disease, and time itself in question, Bouanani delights in naming things — weeping willows and cyclamen flowers, prickly pears and esparto grass, Sidi bel Abbas and the two-horned Alexander — to anchor his characters’ memories and dream lives.

  Yet Bouanani’s characters remain largely anonymous — “rumpled blue pajama[s] among other rumpled blue pajamas” — distinguished only by the monikers assigned them by a similarly anonymous narrator. These adventurers and fools and derelicts represent the invisible heirs of Morocco’s fading past; their names assume a great importance, a way for the narrator to identify and reclaim these individuals, marginalized and worse, forgotten, first by a colonial regime and later a bureaucratic and oppressive new state. I attempted to replicate both the meaning and sonority of those nicknames in my translation: “Guzzler” to evoke the youthful bravado of Le Litron, slang for a cheap liter bottle of red wine; “Rover” for the wanderer Le Corsaire, his French name synonymous with adventure and sea voyages; and “Fartface” for Le Pet, the old clown with a juvenile nickname.

  These men — for the hospital is an overwhelmingly masculine domain — tell their stories for many reasons: to pass time, to impress or intimidate, to remember. They tell their stories with longing or bitterness, mirth or pride. In Bouanani’s original text, this male cacophony of voices is accentuated by his attention to poeticism, rhythm, and humor; his style is a blend of dense, page-long hallucinatory ramblings through memories and dreams (and perhaps hell) and dialogic scenes characterized by irreverence, irony, and nonchalant violence.

  Immersion was key to my approach to translating this many-layered novel: immersion in the history and culture underlying the story and immersion in the language. To grasp the cultural context of the novel required research into the social inequities prevalent in Morocco during the 1980s; the folklore of coastal villages near Rabat and Casablanca; historical references spanning Moor-ruled Andalusia to World War II. Immersing myself in Bouanani’s language was more instinctive — with each translated term or expression, I asked myself: How does this word sound? Is this phrase too literal or artificial? Does it flow? Do the raunchiest parts make me laugh? And, for the novel’s final passage, do I have goose bumps, as occurs each time I read Bouanani’s ending in the original French?

  My goal was to render a difficult text accessible to new readers, while remaining faithful to Bouanani’s mission: to resuscitate a fading culture and bring its members, men without bearings, without names even, to life in “black and white.” The stories shared by the absurd brotherhood in Wing C may be depraved, grotesque, or farcical, but they are as uniquely important as the odes to Moroccan mythology, animals, plants, song, and food that intersperse the text. The stories reflect the author’s fascination with personal and collective memory, and their overlap with history. Little wonder that The Hospital is awash with second-hand stories recounted by gossips and liars, and a constant calling into question of their accounts.