WAFIQ DARAAI was a young, well-known poet. Stylish despite the simple way he dressed, his hair always carefully coiffed. Talented to a certain degree, yet seeing himself as a guiding star granted by God to the Arabs during their darkest, poetic night. His handsomeness gave him a certain amount of luck with the girls. That’s why Rahhal attended his evening salon—not out of love for the poet, nor because he liked his poetry but rather because of the guaranteed feminine presence there was at all of his soirées. This is what Rahhal would try to surreptitiously enjoy from the distance he always strove to keep between himself and the world, specifically between himself and the fairer sex. Wafiq was a prose poet, and the posers who attended his soirées possessed neither poetic sensibility nor any appreciation of meter; rather, they attended mainly in order to get close to Wafiq. The emcee of the gathering being held at the House of Culture in the Riad El Arous neighborhood was a well-known local radio journalist. She introduced Wafiq as the “Rimbaud of his age.” Wafiq, who seemed to place his trust in reckless flattery, dove right into reciting his poems in a way that his adoring fans found dazzlingly unique, whereas Rahhal found it pedantic, coquettish, and in fact, downright whorish. Rahhal is no literary critic, nor does he claim to be one, but he does hold a degree in classical literature, so he understands a thing or two about rhyme and metaphor. True, he found something of the essence of poetry in Wafiq’s verse—metaphors that corresponded from one part of the poem to another, a few beautiful images here and there, contemplations that were not completely devoid of some intelligence—but when Wafiq started to perform in such a repulsive way that so pleased the young women, Rahhal pictured him writhing around like a prostitute doing a striptease. This was precisely why Rahhal always used to think of Wafiq as a prostitute. Nonetheless, after the reading, all he could do was clap. Not as warmly and enthusiastically as the women did, but he clapped flatteringly; a cautious applause, like someone professing adherence to a faith not their own in order to avoid persecution. When the discussion started and the admirers’ comments came one after the other, Rahhal was disgusted. All their observations were off the mark. Empty talk from silly girls who hadn’t found anyone yet to explain to them that, although there was no law preventing them from falling head over heels in love with their handsome poet, they had no right to treat poetry so freely, so boldly. Rahhal, a specialist in Arabic poetry, didn’t dare enter the discussion, whereas these gushing girls fawned disgustingly as this preening effeminate made no attempt to tone down their excessive flattery!
Deep down, Rahhal is a coward, and never before had he participated in a performance or attempted to speak at a gathering where there were more than three attendees. Nonetheless, he didn’t even realize it when he found himself, for the first time in his life, raising his finger up to say something, with some hesitation, of course. A trembling finger, trying to rise up, then retreating and folding over onto itself before trembling back down. But the emcee noticed the hesitant finger and surprised him: “The gentleman in the back, please, please,” then, in a joking aside to Wafiq, “so as not to limit the discussion to the young ladies.”
The blood froze in Rahhal’s veins. He was completely still, like a statue, as if he had turned into a scarecrow made of dried branches blown in by the wind.
“You, sir, in the back with the khaki jacket. You. You. Sir. Yes, you.”
A woman in her fifties sitting next to him poked him. Ugh . . . What a fix! Who would have wanted to be in his shoes?
“Please stand up, good sir, so we can hear and see you clearly.”
He thought to himself, the whore hadn’t asked the other participants before me to stand. And now which foot should you stand on, Rahhal? His legs and his insides were shaking. His spirit may have been as well.
“I wanted . . . I wanted to say . . . to say . . .”
Wafiq cut him off with a despicable confidence:
“When in the presence of poetry, everything must be said. Go ahead, my friend . . .”
Rahhal almost collapsed back into his chair. He felt Wafiq smothering him even more, a choking feeling taking hold, grabbing onto him in front of the adoring fans, while he, like an idiot, didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Then, the vicious thought flashed in his head, and spurred by his overwhelming feelings of defeat and insignificance and his crushed spirit, he said it. He let it fly:
“During the reading, I feel like you were faking a lot. You seemed to me like . . . like . . . like a pros . . . a pros . . .”
Then, with a boldness he didn’t know he possessed, Rahhal threw the word in Wafiq’s face, like a crazy fan tossing a firecracker onto the soccer pitch: “Like a prostitute. Just like a stripper.”
Mutters of disapproval rose up around the room. It seemed that no one had been expecting such audacity from this meek creature whose knees were barely strong enough to hold him up. Wafiq alone seemed unfazed and not at all troubled by what Rahhal had said. He burst out laughing before commenting in a loud, yet pompous, voice:
“I apologize, especially to my dear ladies, but the gentleman is absolutely right in what he says. But the matter doesn’t have to do only with the manner of delivery, as he thinks, nor specifically with the moment of recitation—despite the sanctity of this moment to me—but rather with the entire poetic process. You see, when you compose poetry, something immoral seeps into your soul and spreads throughout your entire being, your essence, something you can’t get rid of, something stronger than feelings and deeper than ecstasy—a thing resembling passion, a total disintegration reaching one’s very heart and soul. For this reason, I appreciate your observation, my friend, and congratulate you on your boldness.”
Then, under a downpour of applause from his fans and at their insistence, when the emcee asked Wafiq to conclude by reading another poem, a gift of his poetic inspiration, he joked: “And now, my dear friends, the second act of the striptease. Where is my friend the striptease critic, so scrunched up in the back that I can barely see him? Lift your head up a little. The Disrobing Act, dedicated to you!”
The whole room exploded with laughter and everyone turned toward Rahhal, who couldn’t bear the mocking looks all around him. He wished he could have disappeared. If only he were no more. If only his upraised finger hadn’t volunteered him. No sooner did Wafiq start to read—everyone taken by the rise and fall of his gentle voice and by the acrobatic movements that added to his dramatic reading—did Rahhal make his way outside with uneasy, shaking steps, first jogging, then breaking into a run without paying attention to anything around him. He was sprinting as if fleeing from a terrible fright, a violent feeling of shame chasing him.
He didn’t sleep at all that night. While he was accustomed to sleeping in his clothes—pajamas not yet having become part of his tribe’s cultural heritage—this time he didn’t even take off his khaki jacket. He tore off the old, white Bata shoes he had bought in the Sidi Mimoun flea market without untying the laces and threw himself on top of his blanketless mattress, spread out on the floor, no bed frame or anything. Because his pillow, stuffed with a mixture of wool and halfah grass, was somewhat rough, Rahhal preferred to hold onto it rather than place it under his head, and he remained tossing and turning in bed, defeated and broken. But, sometime well before sunrise, before the first light began to show, his soul retreated into dreamland. In the dream Rahhal went back to finish the scene his way. He stood in front of Wafiq at the end of the evening with everything he had wanted to say at that moment but hadn’t. And no sooner did the arrogant poet attempt to press his faux-intellectual oeuvre than Rahhal grabbed him by the shirt collar . . . and the rest of the story you know.
Rahhal only destroyed his adversaries and opponents in his dreams. Ever since the age of ten, when Khaled Battout had tortured him for three straight years, unrelenting in his awful mockery until after Khaled got his elementary school certificate and began attending Mohammad bin Brahim Middle School, luckily, far from Abdelmoumen Middle School, where Rahhal would go a year afterward. Since those long-gone days, he had settled all of his accounts in his dreams. He would pay his adversaries back twofold, and always in the same way, with the same, quick blow from the knee. It’s true that in reality, his knees would knock together as soon as he found himself in a difficult situation, and more than once he had shocked his classmates by fainting in class just because the teacher had surprised him by asking him to go up to the board. But of those same two knees, the ones that in real life knocked together in fear, the right one became all-powerful in his dreams.