![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/TengourMosta.jpg\" "\\"TengourMosta\\"")
<\/a>Habib Tengour in Mostaganem, Oct. 2010<\/p><\/div>\n
A bit of time on my hands, so here is the second instalment of Habib Tengour’s story:<\/p>\n
\n
\n(…) He never understood his father\u2019s 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: \u201cI fought to the very end after my own manner, without asking nothing from nobody. God be my witness.\u201d\u2026 In the end, the final return \u2014 of which he had been dreaming so much it poisoned the life of his whole family \u2014 was made in a coffin\u2026<\/p>\n
\nHe 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\u2026<\/p>\n
\nYes, an era of happiness\u2026 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\u2019Alg\u00e9rie de papa<\/em>! These times are past and may everyone keeps what they made. We weren\u2019t able to make anything from it. It shrunk to nothing. What a waste!\u00a0 Ah! To grow old!\u2026 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.<\/p>\n
\nHe 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\u2019s the point of having studied like a madman, without allotting a minute to fantasy, when it led to uttering such stupidities!<\/p>\n
\u2026 He tore up the page and left the newspaper on the table.<\/p>\n
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 Cha\u00e2b<\/em>. The arab-language press was ferocious and viciously aggressive. It called Parti de la France<\/em> \u2014 what a disgrace! \u2014\u00a0 all those who aspired to the harmonious development of all the country\u2019s 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\u2026 But the Arabs of yore, the expansive ones, not the flabby-bellied ones standing guard under the harems\u2019 moucharabiahs,\u00a0 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\u2026
\nHe ran into Sma\u00efn in the cafeteria. They embraced. He liked Sma\u00efn. They had known each other for a long time. Sma\u00efn was an associate professor at in the law School. He drank a lot in the bars opposite the courthouse and in the Brasserie des facult\u00e9s 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 Sma\u00efn was a rather\u00a0 alcoholized novelist, enamored of Saint-John Perse and Seferis. That\u2019s who he liked best. He spontaneously opened up to Sma\u00efn in order to get a part of the weight that was depressing him off his chest.<\/p>\n\u201cSilvana 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\u2019t even know who Silvana Mangano is, I bet! How have you been able to live? Ah, you can\u2019t understand the shock this news has caused! It isn\u2019t only her death\u2026<\/p>\n
He told Sma\u00efn, who never had enough time to go to the movies, the beautiful dream of love \u2014 no one in the gang could really explain what that meant \u2014 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\u2019s Hollywood\u2019s morals! Also those of old Homer: he needed to reassure his audience so as to get his salary. There\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u00a0 makeup. The character\u2019s 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\u2019s depth.
\nEmotions were durable.
\n\u201cYou watch too many movies,\u201d said Sma\u00efn.<\/p>\n(to be continued…)<\/p>\n
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