“The council of elders met yesterday evening. We deliberated late into the night. With several votes for, several against and four abstentions, we decided to offer you one last chance to reconsider and accept the post of clan leader which, upon completion, will earn you a seat in the council and full voting privileges. What do you say?”
“My esteemed uncle, I stand before you, helpless, castrated by your intransigence. What choices are you offering me? Either I submit to your will or I suffer the consequences. There is no middle ground. We cannot barter, haggle, negotiate, compromise. It’s your way or no way, isn’t it?”
“You don’t understand,” said Yossi in a tone simulating affability.
“Oh, I understand far more than you give me credit for. But since we’re on the subject of misreading or misjudging -- another ploy to exploit the last vestiges of hesitancy that I may still harbor -- let me entertain you for the last time with an incident none of you has yet had the pleasure to lament. And let’s see if you find it instructive enough to relent and let me be. O.K.?”
Yossi shrugged. Néné Buby gobbled like a turkey and blinked several times, overcome by a sudden fit of Tourette’s. Meema, scowling, waved an impatient hand.
“Pfft! This boy’s always been full of tall tales. Do we have to listen to yet another one of his grotesque yarns?”
Someone in the back of the room, my grandmother, I think, intervened.
“Damn right, let him speak.”
Yossi arched his eyebrows and sighed. “Go ahead if you must.”
*
Must? Hell, I “must” nothing. I knew I was wasting my time, squandering my mental energy. Yossi and his flunkies see things their own way. Rituals, traditions, ceremonials, however absurd they seem to an uninvolved observer are as vital to them as is the “smell of napalm in the morning” to a flag-waving lieutenant-colonel who gets his jollies sauntering through a hail of exploding mortar shells. It's the manna that sustains them. I shouldn’t have to justify myself. These people speak an alien dialect and our brains are wired differently. It takes a leap of logic and extraordinary courage to reject customs that were drummed into us since childhood; and some people simply can't or won’t part with them. They’re not really interested in pursuing a dialogue in which give-and-take and fair play lead to rational discourse and, perhaps, a meeting of the minds. All they want is to mulishly follow the stream of a conversation they are having in their own head to its ultimate doctrinaire conclusion.
*
“In open societies,” I began, drawing from a store of memories, “freedom of conscience and an independent press are both an asset and a guarantor of democracy. In other parts of the world, an outspoken press is viewed as a threat to oligarchies and other deeply entrenched power structures. This attitude creates a self-view by the press that predisposes it to timidity and, often, to inaction. Publishers, indebted to their advertisers and sponsors for their precious revenues, are loath to antagonize them. Journalists, afraid they might lose their job or their neck, probe less deeply than they should. Empowered by the elite, beholden to them, governments add insult to injury either by pretending not to know or by sacrificing the messenger. I’ve always believed and publicly stated that a nation that controls or restrains its media, or fosters a climate of fear and intimidation that cows it into self-censorship -- or silence -- is a nation of thugs.”
“Yes, so?”
“So I said so again, loudly and clearly not long ago, following a drive-by gangland-style massacre that claimed five lives and scorched the soul of a quaint and skittish Central American village habituated to intermittent violence and accustomed to looking the other way.
“Five people. Was it an accident? Was it vengeance? Were they victims of mistaken identity? Were they felled in a drunken rapture, as one report alleged, by giddy fans celebrating a soccer victory? Or were they targeted for assassination in a drug deal gone awry? Speculation was rife. When the smoke lifted, dozens of spent AK-47, 40mm- and 9mm-caliber shells lay on the ground, silent accessories in a drama that began and ended with lightning speed in the rain after dusk. The spent shells offered few clues. Everyone is armed in these parts and firing weapons in the air to ring in the New Year, make merry, cheer a wedding party, exult the birth of a male heir or just blow off steam is as sacred a ritual as kissing and drenching with tears the feet of the local patron saint whose garishly painted effigy, carved in wood, is paraded during the annual all-Saints procession.”
“Where is this leading to?”
“I’ll tell you. There’s nothing like a community that hurriedly mops up the blood, plugs up the bullet-riddled walls with cement and seals its collective lips in a terror-driven reflex to sharpen fear and blunt one’s sense of well-being. Nothing like a craven and dimwitted constabulary (the murderers got away and the leads grew cold) to cast grave doubt on the probity of the local cops and resurrect rumors of criminal collusion. Nothing like a timid, controlled press (one paper buried the story on page 56; another on page 75; when contacted, the other two mainstream rags declined to talk about the case) to reflect on a society’s health and moral fiber. Nothing like yet another senseless crime in a region long overwhelmed by lawlessness, traumatized by the greed, arrogance and ineptitude of successive regimes, and disgraced by the ceaseless suffering of its people, to explain that peace and prosperity are but a distant dream.”
I hear the sound of wearied behinds fidgeting in their seats.
“When it comes to bad news, the villagers react with robotic conformity. Keeping quiet being the simplest form of disinformation, they say nothing or change the subject. If pressed, they deny and abjure events that still give them nightmares. It's gossip in reverse. Endowed with a capacity for infinite permutations, this denial-by-explication of indisputable facts is a skillfully knitted filigree of extenuation, distortions and absurd rationalizations, all artfully commingled and interlaced to befuddle the curious or the inquisitive.”
Meema sighs with impatience.
“When persistent probing and insightful conjecture meet with stony silence, when doors slam shut, when friendly smiles turn to scowl, the truth, gruesome and rank, is surely lurking underfoot like a viper squeezing beneath a rock. Asking too many questions in a hamlet that pulls in its sidewalks at dusk is as perilous an endeavor as it is brazen. Attempts to shed light on an unsolved earlier murder drove this point home and forced me to make a hasty retreat back home not so very long ago. Efforts to get to the bottom of the most recent carnage were similarly thwarted.
“I said all that in a widely published commentary. I added that silence invites more brazen acts of violence, more deaths. I cautioned that, armed merely with words, journalists wage an ill-balanced war. The other side has inflexible beliefs. Or guns.
“I concluded by warning that while growing discontent over the degradation of life -- poverty, inflation, violence, human rights abuses and political apathy -- is the leading cause of unrest, a muzzled society and a cowardly press are apt to bring a country to the brink of civil disorder.
“I said much more but I don’t want to bore you. Make a long story short, my night behind bars for ‘casting aspersions on the town, vilifying the local constabulary and defaming the nation’s character,’ was instructive. As I sat on a cold, rough-hewn stone bench, inspecting the damp, graffiti-etched walls on which scurried gigantic cockroaches and hideous spiders, and gauging the strength of the massive iron door, I realized that while my body was being held captive, presumably to cleanse my slanderous soul, I didn’t for a moment feel confined. Yes, there were thick partitions between me and my fellow inmates, high battlements separating me from the multitudes of faceless people sleeping the sleep of the righteous in their own beds. And yet there was between me and my custodians a vast and impenetrable rampart they could not breech -- my freedom to think, my right to say things people don’t want to hear. If my jailers had silenced me for good, as they are wont to do in these parts with consummate skill and relish, I would pass on knowing that while idealists can be gagged, once spawned their ideas take a life of their own and, like matter, cannot be destroyed.
“Predictably, I was released the next morning and declared persona non grata when the authorities concluded that I was more of a nuisance than a threat. So I ask you now, what am I? A nuisance or a threat?”
My question was met with silence interrupted by a few discreet fits of coughing. Sometimes a cough is the synthesis of eloquence. Or prudence.
*
When a child kneads a lump of clay, what he fashions is a symbol. The result hints at an object that has no real connection to its intended meaning or reality. Traditions, to which people are entitled, but which they have no right to impose on others, are golden calves to me, ideological idols I refuse to regard as instruments of veneration. Tradition adjusts itself to the memory of what those icons represent and which, because they evoke some primeval and atavistic but blurry memory, can only be sustained through the reiteration, from generation to generation, of self-perpetuating legends and rituals.
*
“A nuisance? That’s an understatement,” Meema yelped. “A nuisance and a threat. And to think that I once offered him a glass of tea and cookies.”
“The tea was watery and the cookies were stale....”
“Never mind all that,” Yossi intervened. What are you getting at?”
“What I am getting at is that I was not born to be confined. Not by man nor by his word. I shall breathe at my own pace, as deeply or as faintly as I choose. Your traditions may be benign, including the one you insist I embrace for the common good and tranquility of the clan. My mind is made up. Accepting the leadership of the clan, symbolic and temporary as the post may be, would force me to abjure my own values. Remember, I am the black sheep of the family. You have nothing to gain by forcing your mores on me. I won’t be silenced, title or no title. It’s for that reason that I decline. Consider it an act of extraordinary charity on my part. The distance between a nuisance and a threat is minute. My decision is final.”
“Suit yourself. We will deliberate your fate and get back to you by sundown. Remember: There are no individuals here. You are either part of the community or you are not.”
Where had I heard that before?