Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (7 page)

Germaine didn’t have a negative view of Baghdad. She didn’t find it particularly ugly nor did she suffer from its burning heat or its people who were so different from the French. Abd al-Rahman provided her with a large, luxurious house in Mahallet al-Sadriya, surrounded by trees and a brick wall. His father was the first to bless the house where he expected his grandchildren to be born, those who would perpetuate his name and memory. Abd al-Rahman’s father was convinced of his son’s genius and respected him for his mind, but also because he had married a Frenchwoman. He considered his son’s marriage to a Frenchwoman a distinction that could not be matched. For him it signified that fashionable, brilliant Europe appreciated and respected his son by marrying off one of its daughters to him. He saw it as a family alliance between him and de Gaulle, rather than the mere fact that a young man had met a woman in Paris while studying there and brought her home. His father therefore busied himself furnishing the house to suit the tastes of his son’s French wife. He was determined to provide her with everything and did not want to appear stingy. She, on the other hand, was annoyed by his excessive generosity and his continuous intrusions into their lives, yet she accepted his help and showed appreciation and respect for his feelings.

Germaine liked this strange, oriental-looking Mahalleh district with its narrow winding streets. In the souk she felt like a tourist in the city she had read about, the Baghdad of the
One Thousand and One Nights
. She imagined herself a Christian prisoner locked in her quarters by an oriental prince. She had to compartmentalize her thinking: one mode of thinking was incredibly sarcastic; the other allowed her to pretend to experience nausea, in order to please her husband. She was able to hide her sarcasm during the first year of their marriage, and so the time passed without major incident. She pleased her husband’s existential tastes in various ways. This lasted until she gave birth in Paris to twins, a girl and a boy. When she called her husband and anxiously asked him what he wanted to call the children, he told her, “call the boy Abath (Absurdity) and the girl Suda (Nothingness).” When he translated the meaning of the names, she slammed the receiver and broke down crying. She felt the loneliness she had known before and realized that the mind she had split in two had rejoined itself.

She was vexed and disgusted, even angry, but she controlled herself because she was well aware that her husband was serious and inflexible. She realized that an existentialist is truly obsessed, and even sick, with no hope of a cure. Her punishment for him was to put an end to her affected nausea when she returned to Baghdad. She neither cared for his philosophy nor for him. She lived her life with total disregard for existentialism. She was totally cured and concentrated her efforts on raising her children to prevent them from becoming like their father, making sure that they did not become fanatical believers in anything. In order to take proper care of her children she needed to take care of herself and her health. She took extreme care of her skin, her hair, and her figure, remaining slim and agile, exercising every day, eating at regular hours, and taking hot baths. She was obsessed with the European fear of aging, of death, and
anything reminding her of death, sickness, or the gradual disintegration of the body.

There was no room for the philosopher in his own house. There was no nausea or any other external manifestation of existentialism. Germaine left everything behind in Paris. For Abd al-Rahman, love with a woman devoid of philosophy was meaningless. So he was compelled to search for his nausea elsewhere, which naturally led him to Sherif and Haddad’s bar on al-Rashid Street and the Café Brazil. But at night, his nausea only manifested itself at the Grief Adab nightclub and with its owner, the dancer Dalal Masabni.

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Dalal was a Christian dancer who had received her training in Beirut from one of al-Hamra Street’s most famous dancers. Although she experienced nausea, especially when she was in the company of the philosopher, she also suffered from a malaise, a sickness of the century. The philosopher told her that she had a Chateaubriand air, but the truth is that she was young and seductive. Frankly, although Dalal was intensly attracted to Hadoub’s virility, she was just as attracted to the philosopher’s open pocket.

Dalal felt compelled to accommodate her customers by sharing their feelings, so each time she slept with the philosopher she confessed to a strong feeling of nausea. This attracted the philosopher to her, especially because his wife’s feeling of nausea had disappeared since she had returned from Paris. He explained his wife’s condition by saying that Baghdad lacked the existential atmosphere that in Paris fostered such pure philosophical sensations.

When Abd al-Rahman asked his wife to explain why she experienced such an intense nausea in Paris but none at all in
Baghdad, she smiled and said, “Simply put, I had not lost my strong existential feeling then.” This compelled the philosopher to look for someone else because he couldn’t bear the idea of an individually experienced nausea. He used to compare the nausea to a kiss that has to be shared by a man and a woman. Germaine and he had stopped having sex, especially after the birth of the twins, Abath and Suda. When one day he insisted on his rights she shouted in his face, “I am raising your Abath and Suda, so deal with your nausea alone. This is a fair division of labor. You did not worry about Abath, who caught German measles, or Suda, who didn’t stop crying for two days. I spent a whole day in Dr. Simon Bahlawan’s clinic. So take your nausea elsewhere and leave me in peace.”

He did not appreciate her critical arguments at all, which shed doubt on all aspects of existentialism, against his philosophy. He swallowed her attacks calmly and put down
Les chemins de la liberté
. He rearranged the black-framed eyeglasses that resembled Sartre’s, got dressed, and left in a hurry. He walked down King Ghazi Street just as the street sweeper was pushing the garbage in front of him. He quickened his step to avoid the debris but didn’t make it. Instead, he ended up inhaling the dust and fell victim to an allergy attack. He headed toward the entertainment district, where movie houses advertised films with posters and neon lights. The sight of a yellowing leaf on a branch, a feather on a shop awning, or a fruit peel crushed by pedestrians, left him nauseated. He longed for the change of seasons and for a nausea that combined all his pleasures into a single experience, derived from all his senses. He hoped for an emotion that would enliven and tickle his mind.

Abd al-Rahman found great pleasure in his own nausea, but not Sartre’s, as an expression of his complex and muddled feelings. This nausea allowed him his first opportunity to convey what was going on in his little head. Through it he was able to
choose, think, and be content, after having spent his childhood and adolescence oppressed, repressed, and unable to express his thoughts freely. Nausea was a new channel through which he could associate sight and smell, two senses that mingled to form one indescribable impression. It flavored an idea, and allowed it to be presented in a uniquely charming way, deep and mysterious. This is the feeling that Abd al-Rahman adopted in his philosophy and named nausea.

This feeling of nausea was a great mystery to his contemporaries. It mellowed every one of his emotional reactions, which were otherwise characterized by roughness and gibberish. Philosophy was Abd al-Rahmans’s aim, the philosophy he sought and enthralled him. He considered the waiting time for the realization of this objective a philosophical waiting rather than a spontaneous moment. His description of that moment was of a philosophical nature rather than a metaphysical philosophy, one that brought elevated concepts down to earth. It was a philosophy that intermingled with existing earthly matters.

Abd al-Rahman saw the change of seasons as nihilistic, as he observed trees losing their leaves, soft and shiny flowers falling to the ground at the slightest touch, petals spreading over the pond, and the reflection of their color in the glass window. Each of those natural occurences had a nihilistic dimension that, since he married Germaine and moved with her into this big house overlooking the souk, manifested itself every day in spring. It appeared in the space between the branches and the sky, between the high and the low, and after a light rain.

He considered the catkin the most beautiful flower on earth because of all flowers—roses, white and lavender lilacs, and jasmines—it was only the catkin that helped him experience an even deeper nausea. He had a special affection for catkins and defined them in philosophical terms, “the catkins were existential flowers before existential philosophy itself came to
be.” The flower allowed him to perceive the nihilism of existence that emerged along with the appearance of humanity. He used to ask the gardener for a sprig that he would keep in his room to ensure that he would always feel nauseated, even in his dreams. He dreamed his garden was filled with them or that they wrapped around the fence. He would stare at them in his sleep and feel such a strong, painful desire he was moved to shout out loud.

The philosopher liked many things, especially those that enhanced his nausea, such as fresh cream covered with cherry jam. He liked it and ate it almost every day. The combination of the two colors, white and dark red, reminded him of the color of the wine that Jean-Paul Sartre used to drink on Saint-Germaindes-Prés. This delicious similarity contributed to his understanding of Sartre’s mood. It gave him a memory of gluttonous existentialism, suitable for a man who loved food, drink, and good health.

Abd al-Rahman’s existentialism was earthy, organized, and spontaneous. It led to the perfection of the self, not its degradation, to the elevation of the soul, not its destruction. Existentialism provided him with the best in life, a wonderful time, unique moments, and total and complete pleasures. His might be described as a lustful existentialism, whose nausea engendered life, not death and suicide. It led to heavy and delicious meals, crazy nights of drinking, and pulling his mistress’s hair while removing her lace panties. It inspired him to cheer and shout like common people.

Abd al-Rahman’s existentialism was limitless; it transcended all boundaries. His nausea contained an unbelievable sweetness, irresistible desire, and ineffable rejoicing. He acted a bit strange in his nauseated condition: he would slump onto a carriage driver, fall heavily on the seat, roll over into the stagnant water of the sidewalk, or fall from his bed or in the garden. He did not need
to be artificially elevated to experience this happiness, which is purer than any joy. He needed a great spontaneity to know this happiness. He believed that there were two types of threats to the mind: external events that might hamper the progress of nausea and internal matters that caused him to forget, even for a second, the nausea.

During a bout of heavy drinking he might forget to express himself and tell those around him that he suffers from what philosophy refers to as nausea. Once he recovered from his drunkenness, most often in his room, and remembered, it would be too late. His mood would darken, and he would become angry with himself because he had failed to detect his nauseated state as it happened and thus had lost it. There were occasions when Abd al-Rahman forgot to express this feeling clearly, and he felt it slip away. In fact, it was the philosopher himself who sometimes neglected this feeling once he became absorbed in and crushed by worldly matters. He allowed himself only a minimum amount of worry about experiencing an anxious, dazed happiness caused by some accidental event. The happiness he experienced was most likely the result of pure nervousness, a condition that made it impossible for him to capture the feeling during moments of intense and total enjoyment. Thus the eternal feeling of nausea became a temporary one, while the philosopher preferred a timeless nausea, as did existential thought. This fleeting, beautiful, nauseating moment melted too fast, like butter in seawater, whereas the philosopher would have liked it to be everlasting, eternal. He often said to Ismail Hadoub, “What if man stayed in a state of nausea from birth to death?” Hadoub was surprised and asked, “How could that be?” and wrote down the philosopher’s reply.

In response to Hadoud’s astonishment, Abd al-Rahman offered a lengthy explanation, “For example, drinking brandy like this excellent vintage, or smoking Dutch tobacco like the
fine stuff I have now in my pipe, or resting on the chest of a woman like Dalal (whose breasts protrude like two blown balloons), then experiencing a high and permanent degree of nausea. Drinking, smoking, and resting on a woman’s chest until death would be permanent nausea, a moment fixed in time while the world goes forward. This would mean the actualization of a complete existentialism, and thus one would become the greatest existentialist on earth.”

As he concluded, he shook his head, threw it back in a philosophical manner, and lapsed into a state of anxious silence. His words touched Ismail Hadoub deeply. “This is what escaped Sartre. He didn’t pay attention to it, isn’t that so?”

“No, he did not,” Abd al-Rahman replied, “but I would like to transmit my thoughts to those who worship existentialism. I would like to introduce them to my existential thinking because existentialism is an open pleasure, a general one, not individual or selfish. In other words it is a selfish pleasure made for others to enjoy. We will establish an Arab existentialism with its own character. We want to promulgate it and distinguish it from western existentialism as Sartre defined it.”

Ismail Hadoub rushed to write down these complex comments, words that were incomprehensible to him, puzzling philosophical declarations. They didn’t require proof; they were self-explanatory through their complexity alone. Ismail understood philosophy as something that was impossible to understand, which explained the attractive and fascinating nature of Abd al-Rahman’s words. He used to utter incomprehensible and unknown words that gave him certain superiority over his peers. He was lost in a philosophical fog, and through it was able to achieve success. The situation reassured the philosopher’s parents, but he was concerned with his own personal fate. He knew that his ability to express mysterious ideas gave him the power to control weak characters even if stronger minds denounced
him. He masked his position with the excuse that our society was not philosophical.