I can see myself back on a beach in Brittany; I'm fourteen. It's in Saint-Lunaire, to be exact. I am part of a group of adolescent girls in bathing suits. Young girls in bloom with their budding breasts, a spot of sweat under each armpit. All the grace of human clay. Men's eyes are concupiscent, and we drown our fear under an avalanche of giggles. It must be three or four in the afternoon. A sea breeze, an angry word or a ray of the sun, and a shiver runs through our skin, freezes us. Our bathing suits and bras shield from indiscreet glances the ripe fruit, ready to be weighed with a trembling hand. Danger is approaching; it's the silhouette of two men in the prime of life. A slight sensation of dizziness. They draw closer still, talking all the while. Suddenly we get up and run over to our parents, who have remained on the beach.
32. ABDO-JULIEN
AT THE CORNER OF Rue d'Athènes and Avenue Clémenceau, the café Chez Abdou is a favorite meeting place where the finest rumors are passed around, not like the flat old news you can find everywhere else. (Note that in this whole business section of the city, as in the rest of it, most streets are named after European cities, like Berne, Rome, Paris, or Berlin. What's really surprising is that no president ever changed them, in fact nobody refers to these ordinary names, streets without a name that word-of-mouth has baptized Café Street, Hindi Barber Street, the street of the Junkmen, etc.) The café is mainly a series of white plastic chairs under the arcades along the sidewalk. Only four of their columns are freshly painted: candy pink for the bottom, sky blue for the top. The customers are free to congregate there according to time of day, affinity, and habit. There they drink very sweet tea with milk and, more rarely, suitably sweetened coffee in long Duralex glasses. You can detect a scent of something unfinished in the air, a certain provisory feeling, like the dream of a real city deferred.
There is no more entertainment like the movies used to be: the main theater, south of the city — Le Paris — was transformed many years ago into the headquarters of an austere, evangelical religious association. The very charismatic Sheikh Artawi and his virulent lieutenant preach there all day long. Fortunately, little open-air booths spring to life once evening has come. Nothing could be simpler; a few broken-down tables under a lamppost, and a whole crowd of people come swarming around the domino players. A more serious clientele of minor civil servants comes to Abdou's to feel the temperature of the city, and a swarm of plainclothes policemen and informers of all kinds slip in among them more easily than a hammerhead shark in the midst of a school of mackerel. Papa doesn't set foot there any more; the petition probably has something to do with that.
Recently, rumors have been going around about the new exterminating angel, the darling of the rabble, Osama bin Laden himself. It seems the authorities are very concerned about the explosion of slogans and graffiti singing the glories and inevitable victory of the Great Bearded One: a gigantic “Long Live Osama” has been scrawled over the wall at the entrance to the public high school for almost three days now. T-shirts bearing his face are proudly exhibited on Place Rimbaud or Place Menelik. Other slogans painted on the walls of the city have been reported, other words of aggressive sympathy in strategic points of the capital. The French military — and more recently the Americans and Germans — will not fail to classify, photograph, and carefully analyze every atom of the wall thus profaned before sending it off to Washington or Berlin for a series of complementary examinations. Battalions of Marines and the soldiers of the Bundeswehr are, in fact, looking for the elusive man of the caves. Would the hyena emerge from the bed of the dried-out wadi, from the belly of the protecting cactus? Every evocation of his name is submerged by a sea of rumors and terrified faces. Reports from some editorialists in New York, on the strength of statements from Pentagon officials, have located him in the nakedness of nearby Somalia. Which more than one native of the country has found astonishing, although they are usually placid and not very impressionable.
During the last presidential elections, the first in the era of the multiparty system, I accompanied Papa early in the morning. There were already a lot of people in front of the polling place. Plainclothes policemen, security agents in their little black cars, easy to spot from far away. A dozen uniformed policemen had the voters stand in two parallel lines and then ushered them into the voting place, normally just an elementary school. There was a lot of electricity in the air, for the neighborhood is known to be openly favorable to the opposition, like all the neighborhoods of the magalla. Informers were pacing back and forth in the schoolyard near the fountain that ordinarily attracts the games and laughter of the students. Policemen gave us scalding looks when we reached the threshold of the voting place. Others were seeing old ladies to the door; they were holding their newly stamped voting card in one hand and a thousand-franc bill in the other, the spoonful of honey after the bitter pill.
33. AWALEH
WHAT CAN ONE SAY about the multitude of djinns that surround us throughout our lives, of the band of frowning demons with heavily wrinkled brows who keep watch on our slightest feelings and impulses, and the trolls throwing us into the depths of disgrace at the first mistake? What can one say about those invisible beings who have one foot in the realm of the visible? What can we make of those nymphs who set monstrous traps for us, capitalizing on our little weaknesses, our occasional blindness; they lure us with fantasies like bathing the body of our lovers in the reflections of the moon, probing everywhere and seeking what can be said in what is impossible to say. How can we avoid awakening the spirits who hibernate in the bottom of our own darkness? Man is a wheezing, crotchety mollusk, dragging himself along on the thread of his fate. He dreams his life on a large scale but that can't be. He is there, terribly anxious; daily effort has chipped away at him, and he has settled into a convenient silence. The worst is yet to come. If happiness existed in this world here below, it would take the shape of a fountain of milk, the Ancients thought. God would be maternal, would breast-feed the little birds, the little refugees, the malnourished, the orphans, everything life drops and abandons by the roadside. As I think of Him, I immediately open myself to Him, to pray serenely. To chant, with my eyes closed in ecstasy, the ninety-nine names of the very holy Prophet. That is how I regain peace of mind and body.