Discovery of the New World, page 19
Yes: I’m still sitting on my chair, eyes turned toward Hamid’s brother, then, after a long pause, a moment in which I saw a gigantic door opening before me, a door revealing a gigantic abyss before me, and I looked back to the balcony, the sea I guess or something like that.
Hamid’s brother came into the room and I tracked his movements until they reached that bed where I spend hours trying to understand, in those moments when, abruptly or for a lingering while, a kind of attentive lucidity descended on me, along with a struggle to preserve this against any foreign intrusion, trying to clasp it within me like a precious toy, a fragile one that mustn’t be dropped.
Several hours in the night, alone—because at those times Mother is no longer any help, with her tears and the way I can make out their sound, tears I’d rather not see or hear or suffer.
Of course: I understand everything in spite of the veil they’ve thrown over my face and eyes, your veil, I’m sure of it, gripping me. So that’s how I’m alone
and understand everything, without being able to say I understand everything, and that’s how, no matter what means I adopt, I will succeed one day in saying that: I understand everything.
Hamid—or his brother—
yes, why?
there are moments when you can touch every wall at the same time, find the entrance and the exit, the courtyard, the second floor, the cellar, and the surrounding areas;
certain times you guess at or recognize people, people going by, near or a bit farther off, whom you greet, name, or, also, ignore;
certain times that you have in your hands without knowing it, you think you hold nothing, which is wrong, absolutely false.
that’s why many people thought we had nothing, that we were nothing, and all because of us ourselves, because of one simple thought, murderous and irreparable: that we had nothing, that we were nothing.
that’s why I say Hamid, or his brother;
—Hamid
why does dad keep on making these genealogy lists when he knows the country is forever transformed, yes, transformed in a way no genealogy could ever show.
So?
How to understand my father’s stubbornness? out beyond myself and everything else, and pursue this quest slowly as if nothing much were happening, while, at the same time, what’s happening is a whole neglected and falsified world, altered so you can’t believe your eyes and ears?
A minor thing, this thing that passes through me, and yet if there hadn’t been that moment when father disappeared in the distance, I wouldn’t have understood much, either, about the country, or Jidda.
As if the country had revolved within me, or might have turned around in me because we all are, in one degree or level or requirement or another the relay points in a territory and a landscape more ancient than ourselves. I tried to tell Dahmane well before the irreversible happened, well before the country was twisted beyond all repair, before my thoughts, desires and illusions might launch themselves like tracers over the flat pavement of the world. I tried to tell Dahmane that, but Dahmane is smoking, and through the smoke I see the smile on his lips.
Yes, Dahmane is smoking, his lips move and I can hear that voice, still distanced from all the warfare and waste, reaching out to me:
Did you know Malika before today?
Dahmane had always thought he might write something about Malika, a theater piece of sorts, to duly offer her her kingdom.
But the play got written in me, in me, against me: what I wouldn’t know how to say but can still enunciate in this way, within my own trajectory beyond country-mother, toward those zones that might receive me brutally, I don’t know, but that I’m going to know for the first time as I wait for my father.
Dahmane smokes, and I see, through the smoke, his smiling lips, speaking, telling me something, or maybe just: he must be thinking of our running there, in the dunes, among the spots where the summits of the dunes are covered with bushes and shrubs where… but Dahmane’s smile bothers me because I don’t like talking about these things that make your heart drift within you, like a cloud.
A girl from Batna: Dahmane says, and my hide cracks open: She’s a Batna girl: with a stone’s weight. A Batna girl.
On the inside I see several veins than run through the stone, blue
The intensity of blue that Jidda’s eyes have.
The stone crumbles, on the surface, all around where it’s cracked, so that my fingers gather not dust, but sand.
The same sand as that of the dunes when Malika stretched out on it, when I caressed her temple, when I kissed her.
No: Malika is silent.
Her hands rummage in my hair as in grass, slowly, as if trying to find something there, in my hair, or in those dunes that hide the beach and the sea but let the sky surge above us like a dream.
I know nothing about any of this, though I’ve heard much said about it, though, more than once, they’ve tried to drag me toward these things.
Yes. But.
Malika did everything everything and I’m not even sure I understood everything she did, especially when I think about that look Dahmane had, about everyone at the beach, about my desire to know everything and at the same time know nothing at all, because
Malika was already in the bus from The Redoubt when we got in, as if—yes—I…—Dahmane’s smile bothers me and would bother anyone who might find himself there before him—she was waiting for us: that’s right: Waiting for Us.
Dahmane introduced us, just enough to bring it off in a laughing way, our first sight. Clos-Salembier will be the first independent city in the country, even if there are still soldiers around.
“She’s a Batna girl,” Dahmane says, and she surveys whatever Clos-Salembier might look like from high on a bus: you see it all.
The trip toward Sidi-Ferruch—yet another marabout, even less competent than the others given that the shore should have remained unapproached or unapproachable, but now, with all the construction and the arriving and leaving: well we’re still happy that you can occasionally get to Sidi-Ferruch65—is calm, as if I were Malika’s body, her sand-body, laugh-body, languor-body seated between Dahmane and me, as if I were
Several people are staring at us, in the bus, and in a strange way, as if the trip to Sidi-Ferruch could be some kind of pilgrimage or ritual procession, as if there weren’t enough sad or dead people in this town and this country.
Several stare at us, in the bus, not in a curious way, no: hard.
Others look away, pretend to be looking far off, beyond the bus’s route, but I know—and Malika knows too—and Dahmane too—that we’re the ones they’re looking at that way, as if we weren’t a side of their own selves, the part they hide, the one they don’t want to enjoy, while everywhere there already reigns, over the territories of this country about to be born, the dusty panting of death.
Malika looks at me
I think she understands what’s going on in the bus better than anyone here, Dahmane and I, or those feigning indifference.
We are here
Yes We and the other Europeans or Muslims who stare at us and inwardly insult us
Not so nice, the inward insult, I’m thinking I’m thinking!
Not so pretty; it makes your face out to be something in a newspaper, with, moreover, an evil caption on your forehead:
Malika asked me to stay silent
to not look insolently at everyone in the bus and to wait till we were far from everybody, near the beach, and the ground, the rocks where the ocean’s white memory bursts, or the road, smelling of salt and broadening before us, like the sea.
Dahmane says nothing.
But I know he’s already a thousand miles from here, and that nothing, not even the faces turned upon us in the bus, will cost him his joy, this calculated, fragile joy stolen out of the world’s suffocation.
Malika shifted, so then I wrote on the drawing, on the flattest part of their heads:
“THE QUEEN OF THE AURĒS IS TRAVELLING IN THE SIDI-FERRUCH BUS,
the key city where they came ashore in 1830.”66
then added:
“TWO ALGERIAN MEN AND A WOMAN ARE CAUGHT ON THE SIDI-FERRUCH BUS,
the police are making inquiries
but they despair of getting a
confession to the crime
what crime? it doesn’t matter
what crime.”
Malika laughs now, with every newspaper page or headline I read for her.
Breaking news: “Every morning, around 1830, I dunk my buttered bread in my warm coffee, and I run off to be the watch dog of Public Health. The Algerians don’t like me. I don’t like the Algerians. One day, Algeria will be independent. And that day, I’ll beat it out of here.”
At this point, Dahmane can’t handle it anymore, he’ll shatter the bus windows with his laugh, the big jerk.
Pick a number.
This is Malika speaking.
Pick a number.
5.
Pick a month.
5 is a loser, in the whole territory
: July
One date yields another
Always the same one
Dug into our hearts like a fishhook
My skin is ripping afresh, like the tender flesh, pink or white or blue or red of a fish 1830.
We have been bitten in our most tender place and someday we’ll have to fix this, take the fish back to the ocean it came from, let salt have its way on the wound and bury the fishhook in a hole, far off
1830.
It’s useless circling around, you always come back to this point, at least for the moment, and that’s in spite of
:Dahmane says we have to get off and run to the East end of the beach where he’s supposed to meet someone
Who?
The ocean, my man!
The ocean, the one that hollows your stomach, reddens your eyes, envelopes your body, animates your arms and legs, colors your skin, bathes your head, lends you its aroma, its irresistible aroma, and leaves you flat on your back with happiness and being
Your skin.
Dahmane is already running ahead of us: a day of all the world’s blue, and elsewhere, doubtless, someone very dear will have to die, die, for me to have so much happiness in one day.
Elsewhere?
Yes
In that space that’s always there between souls, that narrow space, so finely drawn, that snips out the shapes of your dreams or pleasures, in that space where you learn to survive against alien laws, the laws that stab and endlessly lacerate your back, there must be a solution, so preciously buried away that nobody sees it nor desires it anymore, and that
Malika is really quite different from a stone
And yet
From her first day and first word play
My skin has been split open
in two
like a book.
I laid, pressed, my two hands on either side of the pages, I felt something within me; something that existed with me as a starting point, something hard, warm, much more alive than I was.
Yes: a long changing. And then.
Where is day’s first moment found.
You’re aware of this confusion of a white thread and a black thread in your vision and your hand But, this moment when your body opens itself, in two pieces, to the other body; when one mouth lives through the other; when your lip seems to burst like an explosive shell in the world’s sky; yes: I ask you: Where is day’s first moment found, as if, with each new appearance of the light the world memorialized some sacrifice, the one decided between death and desire or, more feverishly, between body and body.
Yes : where you find that first moment that fills your throat and swells arms and legs, for the exhalted sacrifice of the special lamb; that suspends you in the farthest wellsprings of your self; frees you from the world’s fear; and bears you up in the game of your life.
Where day’s first instant is found because, at the very same time, Malika asked me my age, and I felt the planet topple strangely.
“We have to keep on loving love itself, otherwise they’ll beat us down.”
That’s what she says, or what she thinks.
I feel a drop of sweat leave my temple and start down my cheek, while another drops from the nape of my neck straight down, along my vertebrae to the small of my back, and
Yelling. Yes, a shouting breaks out in me, shaping a kind of panic, but Malika, close in, laughs and her eyes are now unrecognizable up above mine.
A yelling: it must be wonderful in the water, now, because the day and the sun too are dropping into the sea and making it blush all over.
Malika is thinking something, in a murmur, that hits me violently, like a shattering of glass, or steel.
“Do you think I’m a slut, being here with you, in the dunes?”
Malika’s eyes are unrecognizable, except for that wrinkle along the side of her nose, I know it’s hers now from all the words, laughs, newspaper readings on the bus.
It’s awful to no longer comprehend a face: not to know if it’s laughing or dying, and I don’t know what to say, or how to invent anything other than stupor.
Malika goes on living within her question, there, next to me, under me, and I don’t know how to answer.
“Hey?”
Fingernails, in the small of my back.
An enormous desire:
“I don’t know what a slut is.”
Malika has just given me a full slap, but I
Me
What I heard her say was: “Me,” and I sensed Malika searching for something deep in me; something at the level of love’s pain or the pain of being; something deep in the roots of anger and love; something that became more fresh the more Malika uncovered it; something that must have, for a long time, been there, invisible, in my depths, reanimated by Malika’s playfulness.
“I’m going to kill you,”
Malika says
“because you’re too sweet.”
I’m looking at Malika’s eyes, black and gold, like seaweed.
Around us there’s a sort of water tank where you can yield your desires over to getting wet; above that, at the place where you think you hear a prayer, is your forehead, the very place where a tiny squiggle of ink has inscribed your lineage and dependence; and in this brief instant of being you make out the sign of your burrowing away or your uncovering.
Malika! Malika! And it’s no more than that prosaic name of the queen,67 since legend and history, the old myth and its believers are already beyond us in death’s unapproachable reaches, Malika, the girl who, deep in you, and in spite of you, reinvented the awesome phrases of the Narrator.68
“I would like to kill you.”
Already I can almost grasp it all because
“As in the early times in the Aurès, among the cedars, thyme and olive trees. Yes: I’d like to kill you, as we kill the goat or the ram, and drop you into a vineyard basket, and offer you, only you, the song of the newborn.”
Malika has put her right hand over my mouth and I, a throwaway scrap at this point, I have only her words in my head, her words, advancing, surrounding me, drowning me, bearing me up, striking me, devouring my eyes and mouth, gazing at me the way Malika does, Malika who sees me with her eyes of death or seaweed, while her lips keep moving and moving and turning me all around.
“Yes. As in the early times in the Aurès, in the Berber kingdom, in the earth’s warm red dusk, in the shade of the tall cedar, there where you pronounced the mother-speech, the speech that condemned this country to several centuries’ wandering, the speech that split time open for the world in its long harsh mad rape by the Foreigner, Yes, there where I have to rediscover the role of the man who, in this part of the world, brought forth the word to the other: the Narrator, yes, the one who cast me as a being deep within your being, the woman many call, the way they do, a slut.”
I : who no longer recognize Malika, and in my wild desire to shout out, but Malika, Malika’s hand, is still on my mouth, and caresses it while pressing down, despite my desire: Dahmane?
But Malika’s hand (that I’m kissing, softly, brushing with my lips, beyond the prison of my lips, softly, as if in the ultimate deliverance.
Yet I’m the one on top, I’m on her, legs against legs, yes, I’m squeezing her.
But Malika’s hand is the stronger, especially in love or after love, when Malika is there talking, her speech everywhere in me, deep in me, and my strength wavers, like a branch of olive or cedar.
It’s been so long since I left the country, its interior of trees, words and mysteries, and yet everything is already here, between my mouth and Malika’s.
The Narrator? The one who leads the village as the shepherd his flock over the days and months of transhumance, who accompanies and organizes the ritual, who rebirths a locus in the world and relates the story of all the other histories told by their narrators.
Me: The Narrator?
He who was born in the places of springtime’s antecedence : Me?
I would have to yell Dahmane’s name a thousand times, into your face, against what’s just come before my eyes, shadow or Falcon, while your mouth presses against mine, and my body cries out, and I slap yes slap Hamid right there in the taxi and I cite in myself the moment of mastery of Violence.
Malika? I would have to
But Malika is once again stretched out under me, her hands gripping my shoulders, and I have to fight against this stifling that points toward the towering sun.
This I know, because of the light that still hovers around me, hot and white, filtering through the grass and bushes that cling to the dunes.
Near us, as a slight wind starts up, there’s shade and the cool of hiding away, and we must have travelled far, very far, fallen in some well or gulley hidden there in the dunes.
We hadn’t swum much but Malika still had a taste of salt on her skin, a taste I’m convinced is the taste of a knife.
So hard to open my eyes, to pull away from the spell Malika has cast on me.
