I was disappointed. To put his honor above my delicious dishes, really! You had to be mentally defective! It didn’t make sense. You can’t leave such a dangerous thing lying within the reach of children. Even I wouldn’t have left the knife just anywhere! I saw myself in retrospect cutting my knee and then … then, I totally lost it.
But stay cool! The present was complicated enough, this wasn’t the time to get caught in the past; I had to think of the future. My ex would be showing up the next day with a full van. Great! He was going to like the Chinese guy all right. I hesitated. Should I let them do their dirty business together and go on a honeymoon all by myself? I had the money. I could go far away. To Shanghai even. They lacked women there. Okay then, I was on my way! On the other hand, I wasn’t
*Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements, which serve to delineate municipal administrative districts within the city. Th e arrondissements are further subdivided into four administrative quarters, each of which with its own police station. sure I was really stabilized, so big trips were not particularly recommended in my case. I felt I was turning red: Worries always make my cheeks glow. I found the prescription in the drawer of the nightstand. Luc was right. I had to start taking my meds again.
It was still nice out. One of the cherry trees thought it was young again and was brandishing its first flower. It’s only normal to have your sap rising a little in the spring! You’ll get treated for a little while and that’ll be that! But I had to admit once and for all that Chinese guys were exactly my type.
Before going to the drugstore, I ran into the kitchen and swallo ed the last pill. The guy sure had done a great job.
Translated by David Ball
M
an, it stinks in here.”
The commuter station at Saint-Michel did stink. Sour smells slithered along the corridors looking for their prey.
“Let’s get outta here.”
They were ugly, dressed ugly, but they didn’t give a shit, or at least that’s what they wanted you to think. Had to pass unnoticed, melt into the gray mass of the buildings in the projects. They didn’t change when they went to Paris. They were dressed in war clothes, psychiatric ER style. Watch out, high-voltage box! White Nikes, Sergio Tacchini tracksuits, international class. They were untouchable!
“Your ID!”
Not so untouchable. The cops lined them up against the tile wall of the corridor and began going through their pockets. Then they opened their backpacks. New shoes inside.
“You stole them!”
“No, officer. They’re ours.”
The younger guy even took out a receipt. One of the cops sniffed the paper as if he’d wiped his ass with it that morning.
“Yeah, sure. Buncha thieves, fuckin’ Ayrabs.”
The Ayrabs didn’t bat an eyelid. Nothing. So little reaction the cops wondered how to stir them up more, let’s have some fun. Too bad, really too bad we’re not in the middle of the Algerian War anymore when you could pitch the sand niggers into the Seine, not far away, right next door. For these policemen, no doubt October 17, 1961 was a happy day: four hundred towel-heads in the Seine, outta sight! Okay, times change and so do certain methods. But you can still get in their face, make it psychological. But here, nothing doing. You could feel them up, no problem, they were like sheep, the sweat-heads.
“Leave the women alone, Robert. Can’t you see they’re shy?”
The cops laughed and walked away, waddling on their big feet like belly dancers.
“Actually,
they
are the women,” said Big Brother.
The two guys closed their bags and walked to the exit on the Seine side. It was raining out. They walked along Quai Montebello for a bit, across from Notre-Dame cathedral. The elder spoke to the younger in this way:
“You see, Rachid, never, ever play those assholes’ game.”
“The po-
lice
?”
“You got it. Guys like us turn them on. Gandhi understood all that.”
“Gandhi?”
“What school did you go to?”
“Yours.”
“Gandhi thought force couldn’t accomplish a thing. All it did was legitimize the violence of the occupiers. The cops— they’re our English, get it? And we’re the Hindus.”
Rachid did not understand. In any case he obeyed Big Brother, did like he told him. It had always paid off and it was a lot simpler than getting your head twisted with stories of Indians and English. This guy was an enigma. Sometimes he’d go on for hours about stuff way over your head. To Big Brother’s credit, it had always paid off, you gotta admit.
“Do you know, Rachid, that we’re in the old student quarter—the Quartier Latin, if you prefer?”
“I don’t prefer shit. I don’t like nothin’.”
“Don’t be negative. And you know why it’s called the Quartier Latin?”
He had no idea.
“Because in the Middle Ages they talked Latin here and only Latin. All the literate men in Christendom spoke to each other in Latin. Do you know who lived across the river, behind Notre-Dame?”
“…”
“The monk Abelard lived near the Quai aux Fleurs. You heard of Heloïse and Abelard, Rachid?”
“Never.”
“Abelard was the son of a Breton aristocrat who gave up his birthright to learn to philosophize. Since the Notre-Dame cloister was getting too small for him, Abelard broke away from his masters and founded a school on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. His scholars followed him. He was young, handsome, and very eloquent. At night he would walk down the Montagne to the Seine and return to the house of Canon Ful-bert, where he rented a room. The canon had a very beautiful niece, Heloïse. She became Abelard’s studious pupil. Naturally, she got pregnant. Abelard married her, but the canon thought he had been betrayed: He hired some thugs to break into Abelard’s room and castrate him.”
“Castrate him?”
“Cut his balls off, man. Abelard retired to a monastery and Heloïse to a convent. They wrote each other love letters for years. But it was all over, you understand.”
And Rachid did understand, for once. He loved Mi-quette, who would often give him blowjobs in the basement of his building. He went wild when she licked his balls, there, a little lower. Can you imagine having them cut off? He could imagine this guy Abelard suffered a lot after that, alone in the basement of his monastery writing letters to Heloïse. The story also taught him to watch out even more for Miquette’s father, the Fulbert in an undershirt who walked his German shepherd through the project every night before going out for a good chat with the crime squad so he could tell them about his Algeria, the one during the war. Her old man didn’t talk Latin; he growled at his mutt in French, blew his nose in a dish towel, and gave Rachid dirty looks when he walked by the door to their building. If he had any idea that his daughter and Rachid …
“Let’s keep going, okay?”
Rachid was beginning to like it there on the banks of the Seine across from Notre-Dame. He lacked the knowledge to put a date on the gothic building. Contrary to Big Brother, Rachid didn’t read books. He listened to NTM, Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg, but he never opened a book, no way.
“You know who killed Tupac?”
“Society, Rachid, society.”
“They say he was still alive in his producer’s car.”
“Now he’s dead. Mozart is dead too. One day you’ll die.
No matter how, you will pass away. There are more dead people than living on this earth, Rachid. And Tupac is part of the multitude now.”
“But the imam in the projects says that on Judgment Day we will rise from among the dead.”
“Who’s
we
?”
“Muslims.”
“How about the others? The Jews? The Christians?”
“I don’t know.”
“For Jews, Christians and Muslims are dead for good and they won’t rise up at the end of time. According to the Christians, Jews and Muslims are damned because they have the bad luck not to be Christians. And for some Muslims, the Jews and Christians are going to burn in hell to the end of time.”
“So they’re all wrong?”
“Maybe they don’t have the same god. Maybe there’ll be a war of gods at the end of time. Ever think of that, Rachid?”
“You’re blaspheming. There’s only one God. The imam says so.”
“The Jews and Christians say so too. So tell me why you’re not a Jew or a Christian, Rachid? And why Christians and Jews aren’t Muslims?”
“You’re driving me crazy, for God’s sake!”
“And what about the others?”
“What others?”
“Buddhists, animists, atheists, agnostics.”
“They’ll go to hell along with the Jews and Christians,” Rachid decided.
“That’s a lot of people. We’ll be in good company in hell.”
“Impossible.”
“If the god of the Jews is right, we’ll burn in flames, because neither of us are Jewish. If it’s the god of the Christians, then we’ll go to hell with the Jews.”
“Allah is the one true God.”
“One chance out of three, Rachid, once chance in three. It’s mathematical.”
“God doesn’t play with dice!”
“Einstein thought the same thing, Rachid. May He hear you both! Besides, maybe it isn’t the same one.”
Big Brother began to laugh as he looked at Notre-Dame over there, so near, and so far away. Sometimes seagulls would fly up the Seine and get lost. They were having fun too, in a way, they were playing as they flew over the work of Maurice de Sully and Louis VII. An endless project; its construction was still going on. It seemed to him that generations were disappearing into the limbo of history, into the nocturne of memories.
“What about people before us, Rachid? What do you do with the Arabs from before Islam? Will they go to hell? Mohammed hadn’t taught them Allah existed yet. Mohammed himself didn’t exist yet. What do you do with those men, Rachid?”
“They’re dead, that’s all.”
“That’s a lot of dead people, don’t you think?”
They crossed the quay and entered rue du Fouarre.
“Fouarre means straw.”
Big Brother had already gone on to something else. Ra-chid was still on their discussion about God and his worshippers. It was bothering him some. If Big Brother was right, then nothing made sense. But Big Brother must be wrong, no doubt about it.
“Straw Street. Funny, isn’t it, how the streets of Paris always have a hidden meaning, a new story. Here they used to cover the street with straw so the students could sit down on dry spots to take their classes. The whole street was covered by those studious people. It was closed to traffic. And if a cart happened to go through during the classes the monks were teaching, the students would beat up the driver and they’d dump his load on the ground. To avoid fights, the city authorities would close the street off with chains. Classes began in the morning, after mass. Since bums would come and sleep on the straw at night, they had to kick them awake before they changed the straw for the students in the Middle Ages. Hence the expression
the last straw
.”
“How d’you know all that?”
“Books. Man’s best companions.”
Now they were walking along rue Dante.
“Dante is supposed to have lived here after he fled Florence.”
“Florence?”
“Shit, man, you really should get out of La Courneuve from time to time!”
Big Brother traveled a lot, crazy as it may seem. He had disability papers that allowed him to take the train free and gave him discounts on most airlines. He had been wounded in Sarajevo while defusing an antipersonnel mine. At eighteen, he had joined UNPROFOR and was sent to Bosnia. After he was discharged, he lit out for Italy, as he told Rachid, who’d never been out of the projects of La Courneuve: The only Italian he knew was
pizza
and
spaghetti
. What’s more, he got bawled out by Big Brother whenever he cut his pasta before he gulped it down.
He had traveled, he said, to set his mind aright after the horrors of the war. A kind of convalescence. Rachid couldn’t really remember all the places on his journey. But he did know Big Brother had a disability card. And he was very discreet about his war injury. He never talked about it. When Rachid insisted, Big Brother would tell him to read
The Sun Also Rises
by Hemingway. But Rachid never opened a book, everybody knew that. Actually, that was the problem. If Rachid had the slightest bit of interest in anything written, he would have understood his older friend a lot better. But since hanging out with Big Brother had always paid off, Rachid just said forget it, even if his ignorance could fill the Seine.
“In 1309, Dante leaves Italy. He comes here, to Paris, to attend the lectures of Sigier de Brabant. Right here, on the straw of rue du Fouarre, he absorbs those
odious truths, demonstratedwith syllogisms.”
Rachid was feeling the pangs of hunger. A sweet, heady aroma of kebab was tickling his nostrils: The only truth he managed to put into a syllogism was not at all odious to his belly.
“I’m starving.”
“One should have an empty belly and a light mind.” Big Brother began to recite, in a loud voice, right there in the street:
“Is this the glorious way that Dante Alighieri is called backto his country after the affliction of an exile that has lasted almostfifteen years? Are these the wages of his innocence, obvious to oneand all? Is this, then, the fruit of the sweat and fatigue of his studies?Never will the man who is an intimate friend of philosophysuffer the disgrace of being chained like a criminal to be rehabilitated!Never will the man who was the herald of justice, and wasoffended, accept the idea of going to his offenders as if they werehis benefactors, to pay tribute! This is not the way to return toone’s homeland, father. If you or someone else can find a way thatdoes not blacken the reputation and honor of Dante, I will takeit, without hesitation. If there is no honorable way to see Florenceagain, I will never return. What then? Can I not see the sun andstars from any corner of the world? Can I not, under every part ofthe heavens, meditate on the truth, the most precious thing in theworld, without becoming a man who has no glory, dishonored inthe eyes of the people and city of Florence? Even bread, I am sure,will not be lacking.”
Big Brother fell silent.
Big Brother was born and grew up in Algeria, in Cirta.
When he was ten years old, his father, an immigrant he had never known, sent for them, his mother and him, to come live on the outskirts of Paris thanks to the new policy of family entry. Ever since then, he’d always felt exiled: Hence his excessive love for Dante and Joyce, his pantheon of the banished.
Above all, he was drawn to lives that had been ripped away from their childhood, broken by political events, wars, famine. Or simply alienated through an absence of attachment to the environment where they were born and grew up, a bit like Joyce fleeing Dublin, which had become too narrow for his genius. He himself felt that France had become a suit that restricted his movements; this explained his enlistment in the army at eighteen and then his flight to Italy, a copy of
The Divine Comedy
in the pocket of his khakis.
“To return to our conversation, you should know, Rachid, that Dante put men with no religion in Purgatory, that antechamber of Paradise. And do you know where Mohammed is, in
The Divine Comedy?”
“No.”
“In hell! Even Averroës—Ibn Rushd to us—the second Master after Aristotle, is in Purgatory, ahead of our Prophet. You see, Rachid, you have to relativize things. Always relativize.”