Sometimes the defeat precedes the attempt, as it did in this case. When you’re waiting for the end of the world, all bets are off.
The evening was pleasant, but it left a bitter aftertaste. It started out well enough, we were intoxicated by the whiff of disinfectant mingling with the soothing aromas of tea and Turkish delight. Lolling in our slippers, we began to drift off, exhausted from the big clear-out. I acted just in time, I put on a CD of Rachmaninov in his heyday to open our hearts, awaken us to the beauties of the world. A vast, sweeping, subtle music echoed through the house, happiness, rapture, golden dreams and carefully crafted mysteries. In this old place which broods upon its secrets, beauty produces ghostly harmonics. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Chérifa’s face, she was deathly pale, she was about to throw up on the rug. Great music is not really her thing, she didn’t know it existed, that it existed long before she was born. I put on some classic Aznavour, then Paradès singing fado that could level a granite mountain, then something by Malek, the Franco-Moroccan singer, then Idir, the Franco-Algerian singer, and seeing that even this was new to her ears, I slipped an old, scratched vinyl disc on to my battered old record player. Something recorded during Am Charr, the Year of the Great Famine, in 1929 or 1936. On the record sleeve, an old, tattooed woman sits cross-legged at the door of her tent staring out at the desert and written on the luminescent sky in a florid, cursive font is the title of a spaghetti western: The Whore and the Flautist. From the speakers came a threnody channelled from the bowels of the earth, one that would have put a herd of elephants to flight. The old woman, a famous cheikha from before the war with a rasping drawl, was lamenting the misfortunes of a young girl of noble birth abducted by slave traders and sold for thirty douros to an evil madam who immediately put her to work on her back. Straightaway we are plunged into pathos and misery. The girl’s apprenticeship was swift and brutal; the once beautiful, joyous maiden sank into a deep depression. Then the harvest ended and so began the orgiastic season for the peasants. Amid the fantasies and feasts, libations and copulations, black magic and honour killings and heaven knows what. The summer sun is sweltering. As news of the girl’s beauty and her doe eyes reached even the blind and the deaf in the desert, men came from fields in far-flung places to straddle the newest arrival. A brave troubadour who visited the bordello between society balls fell madly in love with her the moment he slipped into her bed. It is at this point in the story that the words of the chorus become clear: ‘Enter my friend, enter, higher still you’ll find my heart, it belongs to he who claims it!’ Thirty times the cheikha sings the words, heartrending whimpers from the depths of her being. She would not be more convincing if she were in the throes of death. The minstrel carried off the girl on a thoroughbred stolen from the village cheikh and so our lovebirds are caught up in a gruelling adventure, pursued by the guards of the monstrous madam and the henchmen of the notorious caïd. The tale might have ended there on a hopeful note, since to flee is in a sense a synonym for salvation, but no, the poet decided to follow heartbreak to its logical conclusion: the couple are caught, the flautist’s throat is cut and his body dismembered on the public square while his young lover is shackled and dragged back to the hovel where she will live out her days in untold pain. Since the dawn of time, the struggle to be free has led to tragedy.
I had discovered this ballad among Sofiane’s belongings, it was just one of the curiosities he liked to collect. The young are only superficially modern, the slightest thing drags them back into the shadows of the past. And then I realised that the ballad was a bastardised version of the famous ‘Ode to Hiziya’, which brought our grandmothers to tears. At the first note, Chérifa fell into a trance, I mean a dance, listening to this cyclical rise and fall like a sultry summer that refuses to end, this violent, shuddering telluric rite from before the Gospels that abruptly segues into a bourrée of roughneck soldiers returning from war. I joined in as best I could, writhing wantonly, then passionately, in my chair, I even ventured one or two wails which went down like a lead balloon. Chérifa looked at me scornfully, I was ruining her rapturous trance. She looked at me the way someone might look at a Scandinavian tourist in Papua New Guinea who gets up in the middle of a ritual to ask the witch doctor how he does his tricks. ‘You don’t get it!’ she said disdainfully. That irritated me, so I put on music from my region, Kabylie music and rock from the mountains, and showed her how we shake our hips down Fort National way. Music so powerful, a person would have to be born deaf, mute, blind and cold to resist it. The battle had begun, between the old country and the majestic mountains, provincial honour was at stake and Chérifa and I both gave as good as we got. The finale was pitiful, we collapsed, exhausted, just before daybreak.
I don’t know where I slept or by what miracle I came to wake up in my own bed. I thought I knew all the ghosts in this house, but this one had clearly been a stretcher-bearer in life, he had done his duty and immediately set off for other theatres of war. I shall call him Mabrouk. I saw myself somewhere, I don’t know where, in a dream, in some distant land, an island fringed with palm trees, washed up after some devastating shipwreck. With me were Chérifa, Louiza, Sofiane, Yacine and other beautiful, youthful innocents. There were recent friends, the flautist and his virginal maid, the girls from the university halls of residence, and there were others, acquaintances made long ago upon the journey of life. We were all naked as the day we were born or wearing fig leaves. We were dancing around a huge bonfire. Sweating blood and water, Tonton Hocine stoked the flames, operating a huge bellows with both hands while Monsieur 235 wielded a poker as long as the propeller shaft of an ocean liner. In the distance, a volcano was playing the tuba and smoking cheerfully. The earth was trembling just enough to heighten the rumba. Joyous minstrels perched high in the mangrove trees were strumming mandolins as though we were kings of the carnival. In the vast bonfire, people and strange beasts were burning. Whenever one of them tried to escape, we kicked it back into the blaze. I recognised the President and her sea lion, two or three skewers of gibbons wearing helmets, goats in djellabas, a single moray eel, the Wazier of who knows where, the evil madam, the infamous caïd and others, the mute parrots who roll their eyes at parades when they see the Supreme Leader of all Tribes strut past in his billowing bubu or talk about his days spent dealing with obsequious plenipotentiaries who come to show him some new model of tea glass. From a tumbril, the fire was fuelled with preachers and Defenders of Truth, bound and gagged. The inferno gave off a terrible stench which we breathed in in deep lungfuls, delirious with joy.
It was a glorious celebration. That night I slept the sleep of a queen, though tinged with panic as I waited for the sky to fall, or for the ground to open up beneath my feet.