Proud Beggars

by Albert Cossery

  His reputation as a poet had given him immense prestige among his illiterate companions. He was the one who “married”—what a mockery!—the convict couples. In truth, his ugliness preserved him from a real danger: one would have to be blind to want to sodomize him. Fortunately there were no blind men in prison.

  Again he tried to penetrate the mystery of his mother’s face hidden in the shadows. Everything grew confused before his myopic gaze. Should he move the lamp aside? The circle of light created an impassable desert between them. Groaning like a sick child, he fidgeted on his chair. There was no change of position on the other side of the table; his mother didn’t even tremble.

  “Mother!” The word came out almost against his will.

  She remained silent, as if his call—which was almost a cry—couldn’t reach her in the world of suffering and resignation in which she was foundering. A poor old woman doing a humble but honest job, she continued to mend the shirt. Her whole attitude strained to prove that there were honest trades. And he should profit from her example. Her way of teaching him moral lessons was truly exasperating. What did she take him for?

  “Mother!”

  Her fingers stopped abruptly, the needle half stuck in the shirt. A silence hung over the room for what seemed an eternity. His mother uttered not a word, as if she were afraid to break the spell by speaking. Finally, resigned to the worst, she asked, “What is it?”

  “Tell me, Mother, was I handsome when I was little?”

  The malice of that question! He knew he was causing her a horrible pang of conscience. What would she do? Begin to cry, or answer? Yeghen could only imagine the panic that must have possessed her. He could still see only her withered hands, now resting on the edge of the table. Wanting to fluster her even more, he moved his face into the lamplight, so she could better judge this mask of human derision. Now she couldn’t equivocate; he had her. He wore a mischievous smile that bared his long, rotten teeth, giving his face a monstrous look.

  Truly, there was nothing there to gladden a mother’s heart.

  Seeming to rouse herself from a thousand-year torpor, she looked at her son with love and pity. A thirty-five-year-old man who was as lost in life as a child. More unaware, more vulnerable even than a child. She had a moment’s hesitation that Yeghen savored deliciously. “She must be having a terrible time,” he thought to himself. Deep down he was certain of her answer.

  “Well, Mother?”

  “Yes, you were handsome,” she said.

  “It’s not possible! How could I have changed so much?”

  “You haven’t changed,” said his mother.

  She must be crazy. Yeghen was tempted to go look at himself in a mirror. For a moment he believed that a miracle had transformed his face. But no, it was simpler than that. He should have known that in its mother’s eyes a monkey has the grace of a gazelle. No reason to delude himself. It wasn’t even pity; it was an answer torn from maternal fiber. He had the impression she was happy with her answer and that she sincerely believed it.

  “And my father?”

  “What about your father?”

  “Was he handsome?”

  “Your father was an honorable man.”

  “What a joke!”

  Yeghen quivered with joy. His father! How many times had she repeated that his father was an honorable man! And yet it was his fault that they had been reduced to poverty. Heir to a great family of landowners, he had squandered his immense fortune in gambling and fabulous orgies. He died leaving only debts. Yeghen had been very young at the time; the death of his father, the ruin, had hardly touched him. He had learned of his father’s incredible escapades from gossip. A man who needed at least three women in bed to feel comfortable. A veritable Oriental potentate.

  His mother had never talked to Yeghen about him; she considered it an indecent subject: one didn’t judge one’s husband. She must have believed that suffering at the hands of one’s husband was an enviable, ineluctable fate. Yeghen had never heard her pronounce a single word of reproach against his late father; she continued to believe that he was an honorable man. “Riches excuse everything,” he thought. “My antics displease her because they bear the stain of poverty.” The poor did not have the right to misbehave. For her, this axiom constituted the only truth on earth.

  To survive, she was now reduced to this humiliating work, mending clothes for some bourgeois family who took pity on her misfortune. All these years of bitter fighting with this useless son marked by a frightful destiny had not changed at all her opinion of the unspeakable behavior of her husband. Hadn’t he been a rich, respected man? That excused everything. Such fidelity to the privileged class was unthinkable for Yeghen, but it was the only thing that still kept her alive. The memory of her dead husband had no aim but to preserve this respect owed to wealth.

  In this basement room with its defective tiling, moisture was trickling down the walls. A musty smell of bourgeois security persisted despite the slow decay of the furniture, the perfidious, drastic misery. Among the incongruous objects bathed in shadow, a skillfully carved wooden buffet that she had managed to save from disaster stood out, enthroned against the wall. It was this buffet that created the equivocal atmosphere in the room that so oppressed Yeghen. He would have preferred to sleep in the street rather than live in this miserable flat oozing respectability. It seemed to him that the buffet—a shapeless bulk in the shadows—was threatening him with its utter contempt. Yeghen shivered. It was cold, and there was nothing to heat this glacial cavern but the little spirit lamp on which soup was cooking. He felt sadness sweep through him—just what he dreaded most when he came to visit his mother. She was skilled in the art of distilling sadness; she spun misery like a spider its web.

  Yeghen shook himself, as if to chase away the cold. He felt a rustling against his leg, then heard a soft purring: the cat. Where had it been hiding? He leaned down to get it, put it on his lap, and began to stroke it. The little animal purred, its eyes fixed on him, as if waiting for something. One day Yeghen had decided to have a bit of fun by giving the cat a miniscule ball of hashish, and since then, he had done so each time he had the chance. It was surely the only cat in the world that indulged in narcotics. It seemed to have acquired a taste for this delicacy; it began to grow edgy and tried to scratch him. Yeghen found himself in a delicate situation; he only had a small quantity of the drug and he certainly wasn’t going to share it with the cat. A whim had its limits. But how could he make it understand?

  He managed to get rid of the cat and again looked at his mother. She had returned to her work, as though she were indifferent to everything but her inner dream. She must be dreaming that she was living a peaceful existence with her son—an honest, hardworking son—with dignity and respect for the law. Yeghen intuited this dream; he could even divine the exact unreeling of the images. He suddenly thought of his latest idea, the ultimate inspiration of his inventive genius. If she ever suspected that he was about to beg money for her burial! He was tempted to tell her, just to see her face. Would she curse him? She had never before used that privilege. A mother’s curse! Yeghen couldn’t help laughing.

  She abruptly stopped sewing and seemed surprised and shocked.

  “How can you laugh, my son?”

  “You want me to cry?”

  “You’re not ashamed to mock my misery?”

  “It’s not that, Mother. It’s simply that an idea came to me.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said bitterly. “I will never understand. How can you laugh in this miserable house!”

  This she could never forgive: his frivolity in the face of misery. He never appeared to take misery seriously. She would have liked to see him ashamed and resigned, moping his life away. How could he laugh at the sacred state of misery?

  Anyway, it was time for him to go; the atmosphere was becoming oppressive. He shrank down in his chair, withdrew deeper into the shadows, and grinned. The most difficult part was yet to come.

  “Moth
er!” he whined.

  Since she didn’t want to see him laugh, well then! He would cry if necessary.

  “Now what do you want?”

  “Could you give me five piasters, Mother?”

  She sighed like a trapped animal.

  “Again! When will you realize that I am poor?”

  “I know that, Mother.”

  “You don’t seem to know it.”

  “If I didn’t, I would have asked for a lot more.”

  “What cynicism! My God! And to think that your father was such an honorable man!”

  That was fatal. Yeghen knew the ritual; he would have to hear everything, to negotiate right to the end.

  “Leave my father out of it. I need this money.”

  “I only have the rent money. If you want to eat, there is lentil soup.”

  Eat that soup! Never. Rather die of hunger. His mother’s soup was the supreme insult to his optimism; it reeked of good intentions and respectable poverty. He would never be able to swallow it. Any humiliation but that. Besides, food mattered little to him.

  “It isn’t for food,” he said.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have chicken to offer you.”

  “I don’t want chicken, Mother. I’m simply not hungry.”

  She knew he took drugs, but she forbade herself the smallest allusion to it; she preferred to discuss useless things—for example, this lentil soup that she wanted to force down him. Yeghen guessed her inmost thought; she imagined that he needed money to buy drugs. This reminded him of an odious episode that had happened that very afternoon, and he groaned with rage. A policeman he’d met on the street had relieved him of a big piece of hashish under the vague pretext of a search. The behavior of these bandits infuriated him, especially as it was impossible to defend himself. What a nasty brood, those policemen. All this hashish they carried off and allegedly threw in the river! They weren’t that dumb! They surely sold it back on the market, and at a higher price than the dealers.

  It was undeniable that, besides drugs and food, a man needed to have some money in his pocket. His situation as parasite and beggar did not prevent Yeghen from being lavish—on the contrary. No doubt he had inherited this taste for ostentatious spending from his father. He enjoyed the luxury of paying for others, of aiding those more unfortunate than himself—Gohar, for example. He knew Gohar was always short of money and that he didn’t ask for anything, not out of dignity but because of his simple indifference to material things. Yeghen made a point of helping him as much as he was able. Gohar was the only person he’d met who wasn’t offended by his physical or moral ugliness, the only being with whom he felt in perfect harmony. Gohar was neither a reformer nor a moralist; he took people as they were. Yeghen had never found this trait in any other person; most people tried to give advice like his mother. Fundamentally, his mother was just like most people in this respect.

  He was afraid to feel pity and laughed nervously. No, he wasn’t mean to her. She defended herself in her own way, and in some respects, even, she was stronger than he. No force in the world could shake her stubbornness in misfortune. She enjoyed her sadness, not understanding that one can laugh despite the gravest deprivations.

  He knew she would yield in the end and give him the money. She only made him beg so much to keep him near her as long as possible; she believed her good example would be contagious. All this love, this monopolizing sweetness, was solely intended to make him bow before the demands of poverty. Poor woman! She didn’t know that she had given birth to a monster of optimism.

  He’d had enough; he had devoted sufficient time to her.

  “Are you going to give me the money?”

  For a long time she did not move, paralyzed by discouragement. So she was going to lose him again. This lamentable, perverted son was, nevertheless, her last link to the living, and she would never manage to hold him, to guide him onto the straight path. Slippery creature in the devil’s grip, he always slid through her fingers. His laugh was the only thing of his she would keep, this laugh that blasphemed against her poverty. She could not understand his insensitivity to what she felt to be the only dignity in the universe: submission in misfortune. Long afterwards, in this sinister apartment, she would hear his laugh, more terrible than a cry of revolt. She could have accepted revolt, perhaps, but not derision.

  She didn’t doubt that all her sacrifices would be in vain; money was the least precious of her gifts. She had deprived herself of everything for him; only her life was left to give. Why didn’t he take her life? Would he come one day to murder her? She expected anything from him.

  “You’ll kill me in the end,” she said.

  “Of course not, Mother. What a dramatic idea! Life is simpler than that. Give me the money and I’ll go. That’s all. There’s nothing tragic about it, I assure you. Where is the drama? You’re the only one who believes the world is serious; the world is gay, Mother! You should go out and enjoy yourself a little.”

  She looked at him without surprise, as if she’d just heard the words of a madman whose ravings were long familiar to her. What to do? She sighed and stood up. With a hesitant step, as if she were leaning on invisible crutches, she disappeared into the room’s shadow where her wizened form dissolved. Yeghen could barely glimpse her. She stopped before the buffet’s black bulk, opened a drawer, and began to rummage around inside.

  Yeghen held his breath. It was a moment for premeditated murder, but a murder for the fun of it. How long would she continue to think he could be mortified by these pathetic scenes of bourgeois high morality?

  Soon she came back and placed a coin on the table.

  “Here, drink my blood!”

  What a tragedienne! And what a shame the whole world couldn’t witness such a scene. A truly edifying spectacle! The unnatural son persecuting his old mother! It would make lots of tears flow. Yeghen grinned, took the money, put it in his pocket, and stood up to leave.

  “Peace be with you, Mother.”

  “At least stay to eat,” she said. “It’s a good soup.”

  “Not tonight, Mother, I’m not hungry. But I promise to come again to take you to a chic restaurant. Then we’ll go to a cabaret. Wouldn’t you like to go to a cabaret to admire the belly dancers? You’ll see, Mother, life is beautiful.”

  Yeghen emerged from the basement like a diver returning from the muddy depths and happily breathed the night air. Finally liberated from that atmosphere of respectable rot! Everything in that abject hovel was horribly falsified, impervious to joy. Why, in heaven’s name? Was joy only the lot of the rich? That was a fundamental error. There was joy even in prison—Yeghen knew that better than anyone. In his mother’s eyes, however, this simple truth became grounds for suspicion; she saw only depravity and idleness in it. She distrusted all joy bred in suffering; wasn’t it an insult to her poverty? To be sure, beyond the pleasure she took in unhappiness, there was indeed real suffering that Yeghen didn’t try to deny. He would even have been sensitive to it had she not tried to persuade him with her depressing, cowardly ideas. She smothered every feeling of tenderness in him. She prevented him from loving her simply, forcing him to defend himself against the phantoms of a misery whose illusory and futile character he had recognized long ago.

  Yeghen fled through the streets, still feeling pursued by this mother and her poisoned love, who wanted to destroy all his insouciance. Under the pale light of streetlamps, his short, lean silhouette and skipping gait made him resemble an immense nocturnal bird. In this no-man’s-land between the native quarter and the European quarter, rare passersby sometimes made a fleeting appearance, then disappeared in the night like people glimpsed in nightmares. Yeghen slowed down, wondering which way to go. He would have to make a long detour to reach the quarter of El Azhar without crossing the European city. Under no circumstances did he care to venture into that citadel of lucre and boredom. The false beauty of those great thoroughfares swarming with a mechanical crowd—where all real life was excluded—was a particularl
y odious spectacle to him. He detested the cold, pretentious, modern buildings, resembling gigantic sepulchers, and the garishly lit store windows, full of implausible objects that nobody needed to live. Not to mention that he stood out awkwardly. It was as if he found himself in a strange city whose customs were unknown to him. At the slightest word or gesture, people turned to stare after him. And their police were better organized; they had to protect all this extravagant wealth. Against what? Against whom? Yeghen didn’t see the reasons motivating such fear: they were so well barricaded with their riches that certainly no one would dream of robbing them.

  He turned right and continued his skipping walk through the intermittent light of the streetlamps.

  It must be said in his favor that Yeghen didn’t consider himself a genius—a rare characteristic among poets. He found that genius lacked gaiety! The immense enterprise of demoralization that certain supposedly superior minds undertook against humanity seemed to him to stem from the most harmful criminality. His esteem went, instead, to ordinary people, neither poets nor philosophers nor ministers, but simply people possessed by a joy that was never extinguished. For Yeghen, the real value could be measured by the quantity of joy contained in each person. How could anyone be intelligent and sad? Even in front of the hangman, Yeghen would be irrepressibly frivolous—any other attitude would seem hypocritical and stamped with false dignity. It was the same with his poetry. It was the very language of the people among whom he lived, a language where humor flowered despite the worst miseries. His popularity in the native quarter equaled that of the monkey trainer and the puppeteer. He even believed he wasn’t as deserving as these public entertainers; he would have preferred to be one of them. In no way did he resemble the man of letters who worried about his career and his posthumous reputation; he sought neither fame nor admiration. Yeghen’s poems were composed using simple everyday words, felt with his infallible instinct for life at its most authentic; a child could understand them as readily as an adult.