“I beg you. Stay just a moment.”
“What for?”
“Aren’t you happy to be in my company?”
Young Samir smiled ironically, driving the inspector to despair.
“Why, it’s a great honor and pleasure for me! However, there is something that breaks my heart.”
“What is that?”
“I would have liked for everyone to see us together so that I could brag.”
The sarcasm was so plain that Nour El Dine could find nothing to say. This aggressive spirit and these insolent ways filled him with terror, even though they were the source of his passion for the young man. He was accustomed to more submission on the part of his young friends, but then they were mostly cowardly beings without character. They only had their beauty; they were almost women. Samir was from another class. Never in the course of his numerous adventures with professional inverts had he met such a highly bred individual, such a proud spirit. It was the first time in his life that he felt a real attachment to someone. It was no longer a matter of a vulgar, sensual passion, fleeting and shameful, but of a meeting of two elite souls. This meeting had lifted him out of the horror of his work; it had made him glimpse spiritual joys that would have made his destiny bearable.
He was still astounded by Samir’s hateful look. This boy was too young to be able to hate so easily, or else it must have been for an exceptional reason. Nour El Dine was afraid to learn why. Could Samir be a revolutionary, one of these young men who dream only of crushing the government, and for whom the police represent all that is most hateful? That would explain his attitude. Nour El Dine contracted his jaw and held himself rigidly on his chair, as if the presence of an anarchist facing him suddenly reminded him of his judicial duties.
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.