I learnt to live without the people I loved, roaming from waste grounds to town squares for decades, and when my legs could no longer carry me, when my eyes started confusing shapes and colours, when the slightest cold turned my eyes to winter, I gave up my bundle and the open road and, surrounded by my absent ones, let myself be tossed from one nursing home to another like a piece of flotsam blown about by contrary winds. In time, my absent ones left, one after the other. All that remained were a few vague memories to stave off my loneliness.
In my hospital room, night is getting ready to put my memory to sleep. It’s dark and the nurse forgets to switch on the light; I can’t get out of bed to put it on because of the tubes that hold me captive. In the next bed, a patient who’s nothing but skin and bone fiddles with his tape player. It’s a ritual with him. At the same hour, every day since his admission, he listens to the singing of Lounis Aït Menguellet, whose repertoire he knows by heart. The warm voice of the Kabyle singer takes me far back into the past to a time when Gino and I used to go to cafés-concerts in working-class areas.
I never went back to the streets of my youth; I never again approached a stadium; I didn’t see myself in any celebration and no victory made my soul quiver. Sometimes, passing a poster, I would stand there dreamily without knowing why, as if I could place the face, then I would go on my way, which never led to the same place; for me, the world was populated by strangers.
I was looking at a mirror and couldn’t see myself in it.
If we look closely at our lives, we realise that we are not the heroes of our own stories. However much we feel sorry for ourselves or enjoy a fame based on fleeting talent, there will always be someone better or worse off than us. Oh, if only we could put everything into perspective — affectation, honour, sensitivity, faith and self-denial, falsehood as well as truth — we would doubtless find satisfaction even in frugality and realise very soon to what extent humility preserves us from insanity; there is no worse madness than thinking the world revolves around us. Every failure proves to us that we don’t amount to much, but who wants to admit that? We take our dreams for challenges when they are nothing but chimeras, otherwise how to explain that in death as in birth we are poor and naked? According to logic, all that counts is what remains, but we are all destined to die one day, and what trace of us will survive in the dust of ages? The image we give of ourselves doesn’t make us genuine artists but genuine fakers. We think we know where we are going, what we want, what’s good for us and what isn’t, and we do what we can to ensure that what doesn’t work out isn’t our fault. Our feeble excuses become irrefutable arguments for hiding our faces, and we elevate our hypothetical certainties to absolute truths in order to carry on speculating, even though we’ve got it all wrong. Isn’t that the way we walk over our own bodies to coexist with what is beyond us? In the long run, what have we pursued our whole life through unsuccessfully, but ourselves?
But it’s over now.
My story ends in this dark room saved from hell only by the voice of Aït Menguellet. No friend by my bed, no woman at my side — maybe it’s better like this. This way, I can be sure of leaving nothing behind me.
At the age of ninety-three, what can we expect of the storm or its subsiding? I expect nothing, no redemption, no remission, no news, no reunions. I’ve drunk the cup to the dregs, suffered insults to the point of agony; I consider that I’ve been paid all that was owed to me. My breathing has grown weak, my veins no longer bleed, my pains no longer hurt …
Let no one talk of miracles; what’s a miracle in a hospital room with no light? I’ve drawn a line under my joys and made peace with my sorrows: I’m good and ready. When memory weighs on the present, replacing the daylight being born at our window every morning, it must mean that the clock has decided that our time has come. We learn then to close our eyes on the few reflexes we still have and be alone with ourselves; in other words, with someone who becomes elusive to us as we accustom ourselves to his silences, then to his distances, until the big sleep takes us away from the chaos of all things.
About the Authors
Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of award-winning Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul. His novels include The African Equation and The Dictator’s Last Night. In 2011 Yasmina Khadra was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de littérature Henri Gal by the Académie française.
Howard Curtis’s many translations from French and Italian include works by Balzac, Flaubert, Pirandello, Jean-Claude Izzo, Marek Halter and Gianrico Carofiglio. He previously translated The African Equation by Yasmina Khadra.