Ulysses among the Fundamentalists (2)

Habib Tengour in Mostaganem, Oct. 2010

A bit of time on my hands, so here is the second instalment of Habib Tengour’s story:

(…) He never understood his father’s gesture. To have abandoned the struggle mid-ay through seemed like an act of cowardliness to him, but, at no moment did he manage to sort it out with him. He overheard many discussions in which old companions would side with his father and praised his integrity. He himself would just say: “I fought to the very end after my own manner, without asking nothing from nobody. God be my witness.”… In the end, the final return — of which he had been dreaming so much it poisoned the life of his whole family — was made in a coffin…

He had a brother, nephews, nieces who today were French. While he, he was here. He wondered why. A strong dose of masochism. He did not want to leave this country where he was withering away. It was for this place that he felt concern. Something tugged at him deep inside. It also allowed him to bitch about everybody else and come off best. Elsewhere he was only a tourist, or worse: an exile…

Yes, an era of happiness… Maybe even exactly because of the colonial presence that forced them to take up the gauntlet. It was over. That era was dead. Like l’Algérie de papa! These times are past and may everyone keeps what they made. We weren’t able to make anything from it. It shrunk to nothing. What a waste!  Ah! To grow old!… In these disconnected and painful episodes of a tragic history was there anything that could provide material for luminous chants for the coming generations? Time was drowning, parched owl fluttering above the chipped bowl.

He began to hate himself to have come to having to announce such a banality as if he was afraid of the silence of his interlocutor. What’s the point of having studied like a madman, without allotting a minute to fantasy, when it led to uttering such stupidities!

… He tore up the page and left the newspaper on the table.

He arrived late for the congress. The hall of the palace was buzzing with delegates commenting on an insulting caricature published that morning on the front page of the daily Chaâb. The arab-language press was ferocious and viciously aggressive. It called Parti de la France — what a disgrace! —  all those who aspired to the harmonious development of all the country’s cultures or who demanded a bilingual, scientific and secular educational system. The most basic use of good sense was decried as a borrowing from a foreign mentality. One was on an alien planet. All were responsible, however. In an artificial one-upmanship… But the Arabs of yore, the expansive ones, not the flabby-bellied ones standing guard under the harems’ moucharabiahs,  knew how to treat the digs, the sons of bitches and the viper tongues. They passed right in front of them, inflexible. Members of the police forces kept busy mulling around…
He ran into Smaïn in the cafeteria. They embraced. He liked Smaïn. They had known each other for a long time. Smaïn was an associate professor at in the law School. He drank a lot in the bars opposite the courthouse and in the Brasserie des facultés in order to perpetuate the student life of way back when. Drunkenness allowed him to give free rein to a suicidal humor, overflowing with warmth and perspicacity, which came off brilliant in his long digressions. He belonged to that rare category of novelists Nazim Hikmet speaks of. Though Smaïn was a rather  alcoholized novelist, enamored of Saint-John Perse and Seferis. That’s who he liked best. He spontaneously opened up to Smaïn in order to get a part of the weight that was depressing him off his chest.

“Silvana Mangano died! And here we are, bored stupid in this sinister place while a whole part of our childhood, its most luminous bits, vanishes. Do you realize what that means? You don’t even know who Silvana Mangano is, I bet! How have you been able to live? Ah, you can’t understand the shock this news has caused! It isn’t only her death…

He told Smaïn, who never had enough time to go to the movies, the beautiful dream of love — no one in the gang could really explain what that meant — that Silvana Mangano personified. He described her enchanting metamorphoses in the film. She incarnated both Circe and Calypso: the lover who keeps Ulysses in her magic cave by making him drink a philter that will make him forget his homeland. When one loves, nothing else exists anymore; from being futile one becomes serious, grave. You learn that in all movies. The wand eliminates the too cumbersome companions. The seduced hero lounges in a sort of zoological garden without bothering about the animals that are trying to cuddle with him all the time. But conjugal love triumphs on the screen, that’s Hollywood’s morals! Also those of old Homer: he needed to reassure his audience so as to get his salary. There’s Penelope in Ithaca. She waits faithfully and it is always her. The film director had found the trick to insinuate that Ulysses left the witch only to find her again at home; that he couldn’t detach himself from her after he had known her. She because the modest woman, the ideal one in the eyes of her conquered fans. She was blond and brown, totally fascinating! The unslaked burn. After the eclipse, she reappears in the role of Jocasta, again beautiful under the  makeup. The character’s obviousness produced a cathartic effect which the movie maker had sensed. She was luminous and lunar! Silvana Mangano! How feverishly he had waited for her, at each missed rendezvous, so as to forget the snow of the rue de Froidevaux in the night’s depth.
Emotions were durable.
“You watch too many movies,” said Smaïn.

(to be continued…)

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