Proud Beggars (15 page)

But this didn't last long. Sweat soon appeared on his forehead, and his features expressed defeat and humiliation. He put out his hand to touch his companion's arm, hesitated for a second, then let it drop to his side in a movement of extreme weariness.

Suddenly he realized he could no longer keep silent; he had to say something, to invent something, anything, to hold on to the young man.

“My dear Samir.”

“Yes.”

“I promise you that next time I'll take you to a chic spot in the European quarter.”

“Really! The inspector is getting modern.”

“Only, my dear Samir, you'll have to do me a favor.”

“What's that?”

“Well, I would like to see you wearing a headdress. It's not decent to go around bareheaded.”

“So that's it! Let me tell you that I dress how I like. Besides, I don't have a tarboosh.”

“Permit me to offer you one.”

Nour El Dine thought that by wearing a tarboosh, the young man would look more respectable. He imagined, wrongly, that Samir's extreme youth carried with it the obvious signs of inversion.

“A tarboosh! Oh no! I want a car. Why don't you offer me a car?”

“That's beyond my means,” answered Nour El Dine.

“Calm down. That was a joke. What would I do with a car? Besides, to be perfectly honest, my esteemed father has one. I've never ridden in it. I would rather die.”

“Why is that?”

“I won't tell you. You wouldn't understand.”

Again a silence settled between them, broken only by the buzzing of the flies, now more perfidious than ever. Nour El Dine was no longer breathing; he was thinking quickly, gazing at the young man whose last words seemed to condemn him irrevocably. To accuse him like this of incomprehension was to cast him off into the depths, to let him know he was an obtuse being unworthy of confidence. It was the most severe kind of insult his self-respect could suffer. He couldn't let it pass without reacting.

Looking once more toward the shop entrance—this was becoming a veritable mania—he breathed deeply, then said with a trembling voice, as if discussing the end of the world, “How can you say that I'm incapable of understanding? My dear Samir, your distrust of me breaks my heart. I would like to know everything that concerns you. If it were in my power, I would be happy to relieve your troubles. I hope that you aren't suspicious of me.”

“You're very kind, Inspector,” said the young man, smiling. “But I don't have troubles.”

“Then what makes you so bitter? Forgive me, but from your words, I thought I discerned that your relationship with your father isn't the best.”

“Don't mention that man to me. I hate him!”

Nour El Dine expressed his consternation by a grotesque look. So he wasn't wrong; what he had read in Samir's eyes really was hatred.

“That's just it! My dear Samir, you astound me. How can you hate your own father?”

“You really want to know? All right! It's very simple: my father is a man like you.”

“What do you mean?” asked Nour El Dine, growing pale.

“Oh, no! It's not what you think. My father is a lady's man. Your resemblance to him stems from something deeper, even more hateful.”

“I confess I don't understand.”

“I already told you that you wouldn't understand. But it's not at all important.”

It was the first time he'd talked about his father to anyone, and it seemed to him like a sign of destiny that he had done so precisely to this pederast police inspector worried about his reputation. Who else but Nour El Dine was qualified to receive this terrible secret about the hatred he bore not only for his father, but also for all the manifestations of the bourgeois ideal? Wasn't his father the armed supporter, the vile mercenary who defended the caste of disguised assassins, more bloody than jackals in the desert? Samir had grown up almost alone among older brothers who had followed their honorable father on the road to ambition. Samir himself had only narrowly escaped the temptation of an easy, comfortable future. Hadn't he wanted to be a famous lawyer? Even so, since his earliest years, he had felt like a stranger in that base and sordid milieu. His desire to become a well-known, respected man had been short-lived. He had awakened one day nauseated with it all.

For a long time he confined himself to disillusioned contempt. But contempt is only a negative position leading nowhere. The anguish he felt so strongly as to spoil his youth, surrounded as he was by glorious, self-infatuated corruption, bred an implacable hatred in him. Irresistibly, plans for murder sprouted in his mind. To mow down the lives of such beings seemed to him a duty, a mission of exceptional grandeur.

The moment had come for him to act. Yet he hesitated on the choice of his first victim. Who would go first?

“I think that one day I'll kill him.”

“Who?”

“My father, of course! And do you know what amuses me the most? That you, perhaps, would be obliged to arrest me. Tell me, Inspector, in spite of all your love for me, would you do that?”

Nour El Dine lowered his head, as if struck in the heart.

“By Allah! You're losing your mind,” he breathed.

The smoke clouding his brain became more opaque; it seemed he had been sliding down a bottomless well for an eternity. Somewhere outside a child shouted an obscenity, a hungry dog barked feebly, the bell of a streetcar passing in the vicinity began to ring like an alarm signal. All of these noises reached him as if through fog, like sounds from a strange and distant world. He raised his head with the movement of a drowning man, tugged on the collar of his tunic, then sat rigidly, his eyes fixed on the cracked shop wall where the vestiges of a naïve painting of a popular wedding were displayed. The bridegroom could be seen flanked by two friends carrying bouquets of flowers, preceded by uniformed musicians. An open carriage, crowded with guests, followed the procession. The colors had almost disappeared, but the lines of the drawing still kept their original freshness.

The young man had followed Nour El Dine's gaze. He smiled.

“That's the right way, isn't it?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You should get married, Inspector.”

Stoically, Nour El Dine took this in. The only reply to this obvious, vulgar low blow was to break up with Samir, but he couldn't make up his mind to do it. He had given himself entirely to this passion; no matter what happened thereafter, he would see it through.

To escape this derision! To flee this cursed place where everything conspired to defeat him! Resignation, more than hope, gave him the courage to ask, “Don't you want to dine at my place tonight?”

“No,” answered Samir.

“Why? Don't you want to see me anymore?”

“If you only want to
see
me, you can invite me to a restaurant.”

“But I want to be alone with you. Don't you feel any friendship for me? Come on, my dear Samir, be a man!”

Samir seemed to hesitate for a moment, then he broke into a loud laugh; it was the first time he'd laughed openly.

The baker turned his large greasy face around and stared at them with his glairy eyes wide with amazement. Already two or three passersby had stopped in the entrance to the shop. A scandal! That's what Nour El Dine feared the most.

“Calm down. I beg you, no scenes.”

“What impeccable logic, Inspector!” said Samir. “You mean to sleep with me and at the same time you want me to be a man! Let me tell you, your humor is without equal.”

“I haven't made myself clear,” Nour El Dine protested. “That's not really what I want. My dear Samir, I believe there is a misunderstanding between us.”

He stood up, straightened his tarboosh, and assumed a resolute air.

“Excuse me, but I must leave. My duties call me. I'll see you another time. Peace be with you!”

With a frown on his face and a haughty step, he passed in front of the dazed baker and left the shop.

He hurried now, slipping through the maze of alleys, passing by innumerable shacks made of boards and empty gasoline tins. He had regained his martial, conquering air, but in this quarter of ill repute his police inspector's uniform didn't impress anyone. To fear the police you had to have something to lose, and no one here possessed anything. It was total, inhuman poverty everywhere, the only place in the world where an agent of authority had no chance of winning respect. Nour El Dine knew the mentality of the inhabitants of this area; he knew that nothing could terrify them or shake them from their strange somnolence. There was neither rancor nor hostility in them, simply silent contempt, an enormous disdain toward the power that he represented. They appeared not even to know that a government, a police force, and a progressive, mechanized civilization existed. The characteristic state of mind of these illiterate people wounded Nour El Dine in the deepest part of his being, showing him the futility of his efforts. He couldn't help taking this stubbornness, this refusal to collaborate as a personal insult. With every step, he had the feeling that they were spitting in his face. Prey to a growing uneasiness, he perspired. His nervousness soon turned to panic and he stupidly began to run. But immediately he slowed down again, cursing himself and feeling like an imbecile. Anyway, these bastards weren't going to scare him. He composed himself, resolved to walk with an easy stride, and fixed his eyes straight ahead with the air of a thinking man gliding above the fray.

This would-be superior attitude was almost fatal. Looking straight ahead, he stepped in a puddle of water, slipped, and nearly fell on the ground. Stunned, his movements ungainly, he took refuge near a shack and inspected his shoes and the mud-spattered hem of his pants. The feeling of shame, of irreparably having lost prestige, made him stand a moment without moving, not daring to lift his head. What a laughable spectacle he must have offered to these wretches! Fury gripped him and he swore in a low voice. Then, panting with rage, he straightened up, expecting to hear jokes and laughter fly. But no, no one laughed. Yet it was worse than if they had made fun of him. Samir's humiliations, still present in his memory, were nothing in comparison to these gazes fixed on him in eternal dismay as though to tear away his supreme justification, to strip him of the only clothes that made him inviolable. He could, at least, defend himself against Samir's hatred and sarcasm, but how could he respond to this monstrous indifference, more ferocious than the most implacable hatred? Nothing in their behavior expressed aversion or revolt. They seemed to look on him as a mangy dog or vermin. Why didn't they throw rocks at him? Nour El Dine waited for a movement, but nothing happened. Still this immobility and this deadly indifference. It was only as he resumed his walk that something astounding took place. Standing in the middle of the alley, a little six-year-old girl with features blurred by dirt, raised the hem of her dress and showed him her sex in a gesture of moving simplicity. Nour El Dine blushed and, for a moment, seemed to totter on his feet, then he turned his head away and escaped as quickly as possible.

He wondered about the meaning of this hallucinatory scene. The young girl's gesture seemed to belong to a savage, incomprehensible universe. It was a fantastic act that went beyond intelligence, coming straight from the accumulation of rubble and age-old decay. “Cursed breed! Am I condemned to spend my whole life among these pariahs?” As he thought about the role he played in this grotesque drama, a wave of bitterness rose in his throat. What an inept role! What was the government thinking, entrusting him with such a thankless task? What justice could dawn in this trash heap, this field of death and desolation! To look for a criminal—even a first offender—in this gray and sticky mass was an absurdity. He would have had to imprison all of them. Nour El Dine didn't fool himself; he knew that they were stronger. For years he had learned this from sad experience. Their inalienable misery, their refusal to participate in the destiny of the civilized world, concealed such strength that no earthly power could exhaust it.

He remembered that he was now hurrying to track down a criminal, and he began to laugh. He had a baleful foreboding that this investigation of a young prostitute's murder would be filled with mishaps. He had muddled it to the extreme by his tendency to imagine wild mysteries behind a simple crime. His desire to unravel an important affair, to do battle with a worthy opponent, prevented him from seeing ordinary reality. Head lowered, he was charging along, as if capturing this imaginary killer, this assassin belonging to a superior race, could give meaning to his life.

He breathed a sigh of relief; he was finally out of that hell. It still wasn't completely civilization, but, anyway, it was more bearable. He was in a street, a real street with cars and streetcars and people who looked alive. They filled café terraces, sprawled in conceited poses, looking jovial, talking and arguing with fine optimism. They seemed to suspect nothing, as if life were a pleasant thing. Again, Nour El Dine felt bitterness rising in him. Why was he alone doomed to horror? The sight of these people enjoying the leisure of a perpetual holiday made him furiously envious. He begrudged them their indifference, their capacity to disregard the principles of a world whose foundation was sadness and contrition. By what magic had they escaped the common distress?

The answer to this question was childishly simple: these people didn't give a damn because they had nothing to lose. But Nour El Dine refused to accept this elementary truth. That would be proof of his own anarchism.

He saw a plainclothes policeman seated at a table on a café terrace and went straight to him.

The man stood up.

“Greetings, Excellency!”

He was a man of around forty, wearing a long, worn-out black coat and boots with yellow buttons; his skinny neck was wrapped in a large chestnut shawl whose ends flapped at his sides like a crow's wings. He was one-eyed, but his one eye was worth several, it sparkled with such murderous malice.