‘And how is Sofiane? Did he go to Oran, surely he must have gone to say his goodbyes to this cousin of yours?’
The way she just came out with it! She’s a cunning shrew, trying to trip me up.
‘No, no, my dear, you know Sofiane, he always did have his head in the clouds! Remember how whenever he passed your house he pretended not to see you?’
My little performance earned me a week of peace and happiness. The old bat didn’t believe a word of my rigmarole, but it hardly mattered since all she needs to do her scandalmongering is her tongue and a little spit.
That night, I didn’t sleep a wink. I scrubbed the house from top to bottom, I might even have cleaned it twice. While I was about it, I did the laundry, then I pottered around. I felt like I was in Kubrick’s The Shining just before all hell is unleashed. On my wanderings I discovered a makeshift corridor on the second floor running from the back of an old wardrobe to a sort of box-room — it was beyond me how I had never noticed it before. The door to the box-room creaked like it was a thousand years old. Slave quarters? A place to hide when things were tough? It was probably something constructed by the Turk, those people have a lot going on under their fezzes. Inside, I expected to find a skeleton or see a ghost surge forward and slip between my legs, but nothing. The room smelled of mildew. No gold doubloons, no pirate map, no clue what to do next. Some day I’ll leave a sheet of mysterious drawings here that will help my successor live, secure in the knowledge that his life will be rich and carefree. A pinch of gold dust, and the results would be better. This rickety old house evolved over time, there’s always something left to explore.
Then, suddenly, my knees gave out. I’d overexerted myself. I went back to the living room and lay down, I read a book. I went into the kitchen and made some herbal tea and sipped it as I watched the cockroaches gorging on scraps of food. It’s been a long time since I’ve waged war against them. The future belongs to cockroaches. In some old scientific magazine I read that the more you persecute them the stronger they get, so I leave them be in the hopes that indolence and overeating will kill them off. Then, sadly, I listened to the radio babble on about this and that, a phone-in for parish-pump problems from far-flung, probably fictional listeners convinced their nightly ramblings are advancing some great cause. Tonight’s topic: civic-mindedness and household refuse. To a man (and woman), they put the blame on everyone else, not one of them was prepared to take any responsibility. The pathetic fools. When you’re this deluded, better to keep your mouth shut and not spout such drivel! When you’ve made your bed, you have to lie in it.
Then I wept and wept and wept.
I can’t help but wonder what times they are I’m living through. Things fell apart so quickly. Was there ever a before? Did I ever really live? Did I ever have anything other than my beloved parents who died too soon, my idiot little brother who disappeared into himself or is in the process of doing so? And Yacine, my big brother, who died by the roadside having known no greater love than his rickety old banger. It is easy to be overwhelmed by such emptiness. What century is it out there? The din and the dust that reach me in brutal waves have nothing of interest to say to me. The world has taken a wrong turning, ominous Islam and garish consumerism are battling it out with mantras and slogans. Their conflicting cacophony makes my ears hurt. Here in Algeria, even time itself — humanity’s world heritage — is torn between rabid reactionism and a ghastly futurism; its energy, its drive, its clarity have all been sapped. To embrace such twisted logic is to embrace the void. To say one thing is also to believe the contrary, it is to plunge furiously, hobbled and blinkered, into the fray. Why the blindfold? I don’t know. Time to these mutants is what dark glasses are to the blind man, it speaks to their inability to see and their inability to do. Through their fault or Voltaire’s, my life has gradually shrunk to nothing, to less than nothing, to a series of fits and starts between waking and sleeping before it stops altogether just as the clock in the hall fell silent when its master died. Time, where I am concerned, is a hodgepodge, a thing of shreds and patches, it blends scraps of my — happy but unfinished — childhood, a little of what I read, a lot of what I watch on television, fragments of dreams, a goodly helping of what fury proclaims to the four winds and, on a day-by-day basis, dictates my course of action. I have fashioned a life for myself that does not depend on money or on incense, I have no truck with religion, with clutter or procrastination. Or perhaps this is simply the way things are when you retreat to a desert island, when you sit rusting in a traffic jam. You make do with what you have. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never understood where wishes come from nor how disappointments are made, all I know is that I don’t care a tinker’s curse for the rantings of the truth-mongers. Like Penelope, I am deaf to suitors, committed to my work. My loneliness is my shield.
In this life, you have to hold your own if you hope to emerge unscathed.
The house — my house — has left me no choice. There are mornings, those gloomy mornings that seem like a painful prolongation of the night, when I feel as though I am a prisoner, albeit a willing one since I have no place else to hide. The house is over two hundred years old, I keep a weather eye on it, but I know, I can sense, that one day it will crumble with me inside. The house dates back to the seventeenth century, to the Regency of Algiers. The rooms are poky, the windows Lilliputian, the doors low and the stairs, which are treacherous, were clearly made by carpenters who had one leg shorter than the other and very narrow minds. This perhaps explains — if explanation be needed — why everyone in my family grew up to have one calf muscle thicker than the other, a pronounced stoop, a waddle like a duck and very narrow minds. It has nothing to do with genetics; the house made us that way. Back then, the perpendicular was a mystery, since in this house lines never marry at right-angles, because they were never introduced by the mason’s trowel. It is a shock to the eyes. The nose, too, since a musty smell impregnates the walls. Sometimes I feel like an ant in a maze, sometimes like Alice in Wonderland.
The house was built by an officer of the Ottoman court — an Effendi — a certain Mustafa Al Malik, whose name and coat of arms can still be seen to the left of the entrance, carved into an ornate marble plaque worn away by the years. Which is why people in the neighbourhood refer to us as the House of Mustafa. It’s a little unfortunate, since the man had a terrible reputation for being a paedophile — though back in those days, such crimes were tolerated in polite society.