Читать книгу Street of Thieves - Mathias Enard - Страница 21

THAT night, after having spent the afternoon and evening with Judit, when I was indeed sad to have left her again but above all happy to have seen her again, I had my first nightmare, at least my first real nightmare as an adult. Not an erotic dream that would have allowed me to rediscover the woman I had just left but a horrible dream, where my little brother appeared, the one I’d seen just that morning, infernal visions that were going to go on repeating themselves pretty much identically until today. The subject matter of the dream varies little, its form is more shifting—the violence, the color, the images of fear persist, you never get used to them, despite how often it comes: there’s hanging, either I myself am hanged or I come across a hanged body still in convulsions; or the sea is suddenly streaked with an increasingly dense red current that ends up drowning me as I’m swimming; or rape, skeletal old men rape me, laughing, while I can’t move or cry out—all these scenes are interrupted at their climax by a breathless awakening or, on the contrary, they go on endlessly, the long agony of watching a familiar corpse floating in the air, frantic, swimming in waves of blood. The women who have witnessed me sleep tell me I can groan for a long time, huddled with my arms over my head, or I’ll keep tossing this way and that, letting out stifled cries. The sequence of scenes can vary, some can go away for a while and then come back, without warning, without my ever managing to understand the reason for their reappearance.

I woke up in the middle of the night with these images and for an instant, in the darkness, I mentally prayed, my first reflex against fear was prayer, to implore God, and I would have given anything for there to be someone by my side, until I chased away the mental representations by turning on the light, replacing them with the familiar objects of my tiny room. I spent a long time calming myself down. I clung to the vision of Judit’s face. She had promised that she’d return to Tangier on her way back, in five days, that she’d email me about her trip. The terrifying dream slowly disappeared as I remembered her. I would have happily gone with them to Marrakesh, I’d never been there. It was strange to think they would know my country better than me. But was it really my country? My country was Tangier, at least that’s what I thought; but in truth, I had realized that afternoon, Judit’s Tangier did not coincide with mine. She saw the international city, Spanish, French, American; she knew Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and William Burroughs, so many authors whose remote names vaguely reminded me of something, but about whom I knew nothing. Even Mohamed Choukri, icon of Tangier, I knew who he was, but of course I had never read a word by him. I was very surprised to learn that they studied his novels in modern Arabic literature at the University of Barcelona. Speaking with Judit about Tangier, I had the feeling we were discussing a different city, two images, two foreign territories linked by the same name, a homophonic mistake. No doubt Tangier was neither one nor the other, not the memories of the old days of the international city, not my suburb, not Tanger-Med or the Free Zone. But the fact remains that with Judit and Elena, strolling about with them all afternoon and a good part of the evening, after having practically run into them by chance two hundred meters away from their hotel, my package under my arm, I had the strange sensation of being dispossessed. Finally it was Judit who told me about the history of the old city, for instance; it was she who knew, who looked for places, traces, memories; it was she, finally, who offered me a copy in Arabic of For Bread Alone, found at a random bookstore along the way. I tried to show that I knew things too; I tried to be funny, at least, to seem intelligent, but the awkwardness of my spoken French and her complete ignorance of Moroccan made me clumsy, a little coarse, without nuances; sometimes I felt as if I were being regarded frankly as an idiot. So I struggled to try communicating in classical Arabic, where I could shine, but even if she didn’t understand well but had good pronunciation, I felt a little as if I sounded like a radio announcer or a Friday sermonizer, which took any naturalness and spontaneity away from my jokes. You try acting funny and charming in literary Arabic, it’s no piece of cake, believe me; people will always think you’re about to announce another catastrophe in Palestine or comment on a verse of the Koran. But Judit seemed interested in me; she asked me questions about my family, I told her my father was from the Rif, that he came from a village next to Nador and that my mother was Arabic, from Tangier, that she had grown up in Casa Barata. I had no desire to expand on the subject, but it had to be covered. Number of brothers and sisters. Studies, high school. Tastes, hobbies. Religion. Obviously, a problem; how could I tell her I was a practicing Muslim, without coming off as an enemy of Western women, more or less reactionary. There was the Bassam method, which consisted of singing the praises of Islam for hours until he achieved the conversion or death from boredom of the Infidel. I brought out a cliché like “Faith is in every person’s heart” or “All things sing the praises of their Creator,” which sounded fine and less pompous in Arabic, and changed the subject. Judit acquiesced. Elena must still have had her endless conversation with Bassam from the night before in her head and was grateful to me. She didn’t speak much in any case, and I had to be careful that my passion for her friend didn’t exclude her from the conversation. Fiancée, girlfriend? At least as difficult as the previous subject; I thought of Meryem for an instant, I said not at the moment, which let on that I had a certain experience of women while still being available. Clever.

It was my turn to ask questions, especially the one I was most interested in: Why Arabic? Why Arabic studies? Aside from the fact that professionally such a specialty seemed to offer few job opportunities, I wondered why on earth young Catalonians from Barcelona were on a path that was indeed fertile, but that was exactly opposite from the yearning of most inhabitants of the Arabic world: to get rid of this unfair curse and emigrate north. Judit easily explained her choice to me: she had always loved traveling and literature; she had begun studying English, and had taken advantage of the possibility to take a few courses in Arabic as an elective, just to see; finally, the language had fascinated her and she had made it her major. Simple as that. As for Elena, she didn’t really know how to answer; she said I don’t really know, just like that, by chance.

I didn’t dare ask the other question that I was dying to ask, to find out whether or not they had boyfriends.

Then the conversation returned to literature; Ibn Battuta, the medieval traveler from Tangier who had been practically all over the known world, as far as China (that one I knew, without having read him of course—thirty years on the road only to end up in Fez again, what was the point).

“It’s surprising that Tangier is famous chiefly for the people who have left it,” I said in my finest literary Arabic.

“Good Lord, that is strange,” Judit added, laughing, in the same language.

“Ibn Battuta began his travels at twenty-two, so I don’t have much time left to win renown.”

And so on, for hours. And when I had to leave her, at around midnight, after having eaten dinner, a tea at Mehdi’s, then another, knowing that the next day they were leaving for Marrakesh, that it wasn’t very likely we’d ever see each other again, despite her promise to stop in Tangier on her way back, when we had to confront that same embarrassing farewell moment as the night before, trying not to say goodbye, when I had been wondering all afternoon if I’d try to kiss Judit, casually, to place my lips on hers and when we were there, Elena a little withdrawn, a little erased in the shadow of the overhanging balcony where that revolting neon light was still blinking, at that precise instant when people look at each other with tenderness since they’re headed toward absence and memory, when desire is all the keener since it guesses its vanity is faced with the departure of its object, we were facing each other in silence, and I was incapable of doing anything except leaving, all caught up in the stream of my half-baked romantic thoughts, it was time to be a man, to move toward her like a man and kiss her on the mouth since that’s what I wanted, what I dreamed about, and if we don’t make an effort toward our dreams they disappear, nothing changes the world except hope or despair, in equal proportions, those who set themselves on fire in Sidi Bouzid, those who get beatings and bullets on Tahrir Square, and those who dare French-kiss a Spanish student in the street, obviously that has nothing to do with the others but for me, in that silence, that instant lost between two worlds, I needed as much courage to kiss Judit as to shout Qadafi! Bastard! in front of a jeep of Libyan soldiers or to yell Long Live the Republic of Morocco! alone smack in the middle of the Dar-el-Makhzen in Rabat, and this moment stretched out, we’d just said goodbye and it was she of course who ended up bringing her face close to mine and placing an ambiguous, disconcerting kiss on the corner of my mouth, a kiss that could pass either for clumsiness or a pledge, but I could still feel her breath so close, and the softness of her lips, and I turned around like a tin soldier after squeezing both her hands for an instant in mine, and then left at almost a run back to the world of nightmares.

Doubt in my heart. Certainty in my heart.

The Propagation of Thought was deserted, no trace of Bassam.

I immediately sat down in front of the computer, got out the piece of newspaper where she had copied out her email address, wrote her a long impassioned letter that I erased little by little, piece by piece, ending up with nothing but “Bon voyage! Je t’embrasse et à très bientôt j’espère!” I sent her the same message via Facebook, Judit Foix; unfortunately there was no photo on her profile page.