Proud Beggars (2 page)
But if Nour El Dine has cast off the shackles of respectability, whether he has it in him to embrace the beggar's life with proper pride remains uncertain: “A beggar, that was easyâbut proud? Where would [Nour El Dine] find pride? There was nothing left in him but an infinite weariness, an immense need for peaceâsimply for peace.”
The seven novels and single collection of short stories that Cossery wrote at leisure over the course of his long career constitute a tightly unified oeuvre, a sort of Egyptian comédie humaine. “The same idea is in all my books; I shape it differently,” Cossery remarked. “The true writer has limited material at his disposal: his vision of the world.” Cossery's thinking evolved in various ways over the years, but throughout his vision of the world was based on an abhorrence of abusive power and wealth. And he, unlike the existentialists he lived among, always refused to see man's condition as “absurd.” Like Gohar, Cossery
rebelled with all of his soul against the concept of an absurd universe. Indeed, it was under the cloak of this so-called absurdity of the world that all crimes were perpetrated. The universe was not absurd; it was simply ruled by the most abominable gang of scoundrels that ever soiled the surface of the planet.
Indeed, a revolutionary strain permeates all of Cossery's work. In his early books the struggle is violent and moralized.
The House of Certain Death,
from 1944, ends on this note:
The future is full of outcries; the future is full of revolt. How to confine this swelling river that will submerge entire cities? Si Khalil can visualize the house collapsing into dusty ruin. He sees the living arise from among the dead. For they will not all die. They will have to be reckoned with when they rise up, their faces bloody, and their eyes filled with vengeance.
Fifty-five years later, in Cossery's final novel,
The Colors of Infamy
, the attitude has become subtler:
This easy obedience to tyrants, which often verged on devotion, always surprised him. He had come to believe that the majority of human beings aspired only to slavery. He had long wondered by what ruse this enormous enterprise of mystification orchestrated by the wealthy had been able to spread and prosper on every continent. Karamallah belonged to that category of true aristocrats who had tossed out like old soiled clothes all the values and all the dogma that these infamous individuals had generated over centuries in order to perpetuate their supremacy. And so his joy in being alive was in no way altered by these stinking dogs' enduring power on the planet. On the contrary, he found their stupid and criminal acts to be an inexhaustible source of entertainmentâso much so that there were times when he had to admit he would miss this mob were they to disappear; he feared the aura of boredom that would envelop humankind once purged of its vermin.
In between, we find our proud beggars, who dream of revolution but love life too much to bother rising up (El Kordi); who rebel by “non-cooperation” and a refusal to “collaborate with this immense charade” imposed by the powerful (Gohar); and the poets of the world, who resist the allure of money and fame, contenting themselves with friendship, drugs, and the beautiful language of the people (Yeghen).
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
Growing up in a well-to-do Cairene family, Cossery was educated at the Lycée Français and began reading and writing in French at a very young age. The voice of the narrator in all his work is unique, containing a strong, idiosyncratic dose of hyperbole and comic simile, but his French prose is not unidiomatic. As has often been pointed out, the dialogues, however, are on the whole supposed to imitate “literal” translations from the Arabic. They are peppered with “By Allah,” “Peace be with you,” and “This is indeed a day of honey!” or phrases such as the lovely “in its mother's eyes a monkey has the grace of a gazelle” found in
Proud Beggars.
Unlike Cossery's other books, this novel draws the reader's particular attention to the fact that, although it is written in French, the characters are
not
speaking French, and for me this is one more of its charms. There is a delicious passage that takes place in the brothel where Arnaba worked. Nour El Dine is interrogating El Kordi about the murder, and as he begins to realize he is attracted to El Kordi, he tries to create some intimacy between them:
Nour El Dine gloated over [El Kordi] with a kind of lubricious tenderness, as if on the lookout for a sign of complicity.
Why did he suddenly begin to speak in English?
“You come here often?”
“As often as my physical needs require,” answered El Kordi in the same language.
“It seems that you have a marked preference for one of the girls. You are her lover, or am I mistaken?”
This conversation in English unfolded in solemn silence. Understanding nothing, the [police] reporter stopped transcribing. At first, thinking he had gone suddenly deaf, he began cleaning out his ear. Then, feeling things were too much for him, he put his indelible pencil down in front of him and assumed a helpless pose. As for Set Amina [the brothel's madam], she believed that the use of this foreign language hid a trap meant to ruin her. She sighed and said, “On my honor! It's the end of the world. Now they're speaking English in my house!”
Nour El Dine resigned himself to resuming the interrogation in Arabic, not to please Set Amina but because the reporter had begun to object to being left out: he was grumbling through his teeth.
The switch to a foreign language spoken only by interrogator and interrogatee to create intimacy, the madam's fear, the confusion of the police reporter are all part and parcel of Cossery's humor, a constant in these pages.
As Robyn Creswell wrote in
Harper's Magazine
in February 2011, Cossery's style is “a style that draws attention to itself rather than its more or less miserable subjects, and sets up an ironic distance between their material poverty and its own lexical abundance.” It is indeed this lexical abundance that draws the reader in, and that makes “the task of the translator” particularly appealing and challenging. As the first English translator of two of Cossery's other novels, I have revised Thomas W. Cushing's translation slightly to retain a similar lexicon in all three books, and to attempt to keep the idiosyncrasies of Cossery's style the same. But it remains very much Cushing's work, and fine work it is indeed.
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ALYSON WATERS
1
GOHAR
had just awoken; he had dreamed he was drowning. He raised himself on one elbow and looked around with eyes full of uncertainty, still clouded by sleep. He was no longer dreaming, but reality was so close to his dream that he remained puzzled, aware of a menacing danger. “By Allah! It's the flood!” he thought. “The river will carry everything away!” But he made no attempt to flee the imminent catastrophe; instead, he hung on to sleep as though to a bit of flotsam and closed his eyes.
It took him a long time to pull himself together. He began to rub his eyes, but stopped in time; his hands were wet and sticky. He slept fully dressed on a bed made of a thin pile of old newspapers on the ground. The water had submerged the lot, covering nearly the whole of the tiled floor. It flowed silently toward him with the oppressive fatality of a nightmare. Gohar had the impression of being on an island surrounded by waves; he didn't dare move. The water's inexplicable presence plunged him into shock. However, his initial fright abated as he regained his sense of reality. He now realized that the idea of a river in full spate destroying everything in its path had come to him in a moment of madness. He looked around and quickly discovered the source of this mysterious water; it was filtering out from under his neighbor's door.
Gohar shivered as if under the spell of an unspeakable terror: the cold. He tried to rise, but sleep was still in him, dulling his limbs, holding him with indissoluble bonds. He felt weak and helpless. He wiped his hands on his jacket, where the cloth wasn't wet. Now he could rub his eyes. He did so calmly, looked at his neighbor's door, and thought, “They must be washing the floor. Still and all, they nearly drowned me!” His neighbors' sudden cleanliness seemed highly grotesque and scandalous. This had never happened before. No one ever washed the floor in this sordid, ramshackle house in the native quarter occupied by poor, starving people. They were obviously new tenants, smart alecks eager to impress their neighbors.
Gohar remained inert, astounded by the revelation of this insane cleanliness. He felt he must do something to stop the flood. But what? It was best to wait; a miracle would certainly occur. This absurd situation called for a supernatural solution. Already he felt helpless. He waited several minutes but nothing happened, no occult power came to his rescue. He finally got up and stood motionless, with the hallucinated look of someone saved from a shipwreck. Then with infinite care he crossed the damp floor and sat down on the only chair in the room. Besides the chair there was nothing but an overturned wooden box crowned with a spirit burner, a coffee pot, and a jug of drinking water. Gohar lived in the strictest economy of material means. The notion of the simplest comfort had been banished from his memory long ago. He hated to surround himself with objects: objects concealed hidden germs of miseryâthe worst kind of all, unconscious misery, which fatally breeds suffering by its unending presence. Not that he was sensitive to the appearance of miseryâhe acknowledged nothing tangible in it. It stayed an abstraction forever. He simply did not want his gaze to fall on any depressing disorder. Gohar found an elusive beauty in the poverty of this room where he could breathe freely and optimistically. Most furniture and ordinary objects insulted his eyes, as they could not nourish his need for human fantasy. Only people, with their endless follies, had the power to amuse him.
He remained pensive a moment, looking at his ravaged, now useless bed. The old newspapers which served as his mattress were completely submerged; they'd already begun to float along the floor. The primitive simplicity of this disaster pleased him. Where there was nothing, the tempest raged in vain. Gohar's invulnerability lay in this total deprivation; he offered no target for devastation. Again, he remembered his extravagant neighbors and wondered about the reason for their unusual cleanliness. What were they trying to do? The house would never survive such treatment; it was rotten throughout and only waiting for an excuse to collapse. No doubt, they would all perish.
As Gohar struggled to understand what these accursed new lodgers intended, a loud cry, sprung from several breasts, a long cry like a night of horror, resounded in the neighboring flat. The walls of the old house shook from the violence of the impact. The cry, reaching its peak, subsided. Then came an anguished silence, followed by sinister shrieks. At first Gohar didn't comprehend the meaning of this appalling frenzy. Then it came to him in a flash. They were mourners, no doubt about it. He instantly realized the total horror of the episode: there was a corpse in his neighbor's room, and the whitish, soapy water that had attacked him during his sleep was the water with which they had washed the corpse.
First confusion, then disgust nailed him to his chair, leaving him breathless. He looked gloomily at his trembling, wet hands and his clothes soiled by death. Then he brusquely shook himself to chase away the deadly germs of death and ran for the water jug. But the jug was empty; in his distress, Gohar looked around wildly for a non-existent faucet. How could he wash his hands? He held them away, wondering what sickness had killed his neighbor. Perhaps he'd caught a contagious disease. “Germs!” he thought anxiously. But immediately the fear of germs seemed silly. “If we could die from germs, we'd all have died long ago.” Even microbes lost their virulence in this ludicrous world. He sat down again and thought at length about the humor of his situation. He grew calmer, all was clear and easy, extraordinarily deceptive. No calamity had the power to drive him to sadness. His optimism conquered the worst catastrophes. With a feeling of absolute detachment, he again contemplated the flooded ground, the scattered old newspapers, the unreal bareness of his room, and a strange smile illuminated his gentle, ascetic face.
In the next room the mourning women had settled down to their wild grieving; their howling had reached an unrelenting volume, creating an atmosphere of a bloody and permanent tragedy. No human will could stop them in their dizzying task. Gohar was under the spell of their sinister lamentations. He was possessed by a desire to discover an enjoyable aspect to their cries, but these unnatural shrieks, coming from hired throats, struck his ear like the call from a strange universe. He couldn't recognize the mark of a human, fraternal world. This universe of sorrow, false and shrill, filled his head with a poisonous roar and made him dizzy.
He had been woken abruptly, at an unusual hour, and he was still sleepy. How could he fall asleep again with these cursed women on the other side of the wall? They would have no pity. Gohar trembled, he was cold. He stiffened, let a moment pass, then rose from his chair. He had decided to go out.
He picked up his tarboosh, which was lying in a corner of the room untouched by the flood, stuck it on his head, took his cane, and went out on the landing. His neighbor's door was wide open. Gohar hesitated, a little wary. His instinct told him to be prudentâhe feared the worst from these raging busybodies. Seeing a man, they might let themselves go even more, if only for appearance's sake. Gohar shivered at this idea, and, without thinking, dashed onto the wobbly staircase, carrying with him the fleeting vision of a pack of giant women dressed in full black
melayas
, squatting on the ground in a circle, their faces and hands painted with laundry blueing. They were beating their breasts while uttering their demonic cries. Gohar suddenly felt he was fainting and that the staircase was vanishing under his feet. He never knew how he reached the street.