Translated from the Arabic by May Jayyusi and Anthony Thwaite
The Body
Summer. Overflowing pavements. A white illuminated world. The morning bustle, quick, invigorating. A period of one’s childhood, suffused with warmth, sears the heart.
A memory flowing and bustling, carried by the wind from the green hills. The wind saturated with the smell of grass, forest leaves, and the expanse of sea.
The Square. Nubile schoolgirls pass by with their short colored dresses. Rosy faces, throbbing with health and liveliness. The wind that springs up lifts the short dresses a little, then higher. Suddenly the morning glitters. Summer glows, reflected from the marble of white and brown flesh. The smell of grass and sea disappears.
The atmosphere is agitated now by the smell of something hot, delicious, and painful.
Inside a glass café, at the edge of the opposite pavement, a face alien to the world. A neutral face, monotonously chewing gum. When the wind lifts the dress of a passing girl, he presses the gum between his teeth causing a small explosion.
His face, except for the retinas of his fiery eyes, appears to be undefined, neutral as a rock, while observing the summer and other things.
Except that something else can be observed, behind his neutrality—a kind of annoyance mixed with a harsh disgust. His gestures, inside the café, in the midst of the mechanical din of people, are slightly neurotic, while anyone observing him closely would doubt that he is thinking of anything in particular.
The truth is, he is simply there. Sitting on a chair, an empty table in front of him. His left ankle resting on the opposite leg. A hand, loosely hanging, seems to have been forgotten there, while the other is on the top of the table, its fingers moving to a monotonous and meaningless beat.
Between this man, sitting behind the glass front, and the outside world there is a white curtain and then there is the glass. His eyes, sharp as a hawk’s, pierce through the screen, the glass, the streets, and the bodies of the passersby. They pierce faces, the half-exposed breasts, the thighs that dazzle the eyes and inflame the blood.
Although the face perched behind the glass appears to be immersed in its own sense of anatomy and personal solitude, something else might move behind this cold reserve. Something that, on breaking out, sweeps away the neutrality to give the face an expression full of pain and desire.
The man sitting on a chair in the café is constantly changing: his depths singing with secret desires, residing in his fiery sphere, the sphere of the five senses, center of energy and action.
From a time impossible to recall, objects had taken on their hard fiery form there. Transformed from the objective world, drawn by a power overwhelming to the force of reason, to the sphere of fire and sensation where the absolute, the private, and the brutal desire for possession are to be found. Place, time, and people were involved in this transformation. All formulae seemed to have been molded in his depths, in the image of his desires.
His name was Muhammed. However, after a series of special procedures and painful, physical, sensual experiences, he came to be known as Alazrak—“The Blue.”
His gait as he swaggers with his Spartan body, the wind playing with the blue scarf around his neck and his hair falling in waves to his shoulders, is reminiscent of the gait of actors playing the role of a roughneck.
At such times, as he cuts across pavements and people, he would imagine that all eyes were fixed on him. Frightened eyes, awed by his athletic walk. There walks Alazrak!
Perhaps he hears it echoing in his depths. The throb of an inner intoxication would rise in his blood. He would stretch his body high, strutting like a peacock, surveying with his sharp eyes the passing human flies.
Alazrak is the beautiful beast of the city. Bewitcher of girls and possessor of the sharp dagger that he draws only to plant in the heart of a man who deserves death.
He sees in the fleeting faces, the glass fronts and the lighted sky, his own solid dark face. A woman once said, “In your barbaric face, there is a cruelty that women desire and at which men tremble.”
In the streets of the city bounded from the west by the sea and from the east by the African forests, Alazrak had asserted his existence among the gangs of looters and the vagrants; the alcoholics and the gamblers; the prisoners and the police.
This had begun at the end of a wintry day in a remote village of the Oras Mountains.* On that day his father had rebuked him for abandoning school and starting on the road of robbery and vagrancy. That evening their discussion became heated and the father had attempted to teach him good conduct by beating him up. But the cruel blows on his head had pained Alazrak and he rebelled and foamed, “Enough. Enough. You are killing me, you madman.”
When the brutality of the blows increased, Alazrak sprang up like an enraged tiger. He twisted his father’s arm and slapped him, then threw him to the ground smashing his face and teeth in. Then he fled the house, never to return.
Now as he reclines on the café’s chair, he remembers bits of his argument with his father: “You swine, you dog. You hit your father?! How will you face your Lord on the day of judgment, you enemy of God?”
Just as he recalls his father’s face bloodied and humbled, he recalls how he cursed him, spitting in the air, “Leave me alone you and your God! From now on Alazrak will be his own lord and master.”
The Revenge
He descended on the city† that had fought the invaders after years of occupation filled with bitterness, terror, and brutality. He had arrived in the last week before their departure. The week that was named the week of terror and blood. In those terrifying days Alazrak witnessed the foreigners demolishing the city with explosives and hunting and sniping at the children. He saw the massacres of old men and the rape of young girls in streets and squares.
The invaders were celebrating, in that tragic manner, the rituals of their hatred and defeat, as if they were setting up games in a riotous carnival colored by blood, fire, vengeance, and blind chaos.
In the week of blood and explosions, Alazrak entered upon his dangerous course.
The killing of innocent women, children, and old people in that gratuitous fashion had aroused in him something like nausea, which was later to explode in sudden spasms of hatred.
There he is, avoiding main thoroughfares, quickly crossing dark corners. Suddenly a bullet rings out, hitting a wall.
Alazrak freezes for a moment, observing the flash of bullets from one of the windows. He finds the window and pinpoints the fenced house. Cautiously, he advances, his back to the wall. With the agility of a panther, he climbs the wall surrounding the house. Broken glass, embedded at the top, cuts his hands. He jumps into the courtyard, disappearing among the trees. As soon as the shooting stops, he climbs a tree close to the window and crouches there. Just before dawn Alazrak smashes the window and enters the room. At the noise, the light is switched on in the drawing room where Alazrak surprises his opponent. He flings the fair-skinned colonist onto the brilliant white marble floor. The colonist’s green eyes protrude, pleading for mercy. Coldly he sits on top of his chest, stifling his voice. He pulls out his knife and slaughters him like an animal, then flees.
As he runs away, what he had witnessed in the week of terror passes in front of him, with fragments of stories told to him in his childhood about the brutality of the invaders, the torture camps, the acts of extermination, of burning and rape.
With the sun and solitude, these fragments have fused together in his depths, spreading thick shadows of depression, dark moods, and an untamable drive toward death.
The Shame
After drinking coffee and smoking countless cigarettes during the day and greedily drinking beer in a frenzy at night, Alazrak’s other world begins, alone or with members of a gang from the wolves of the city.
There is always a store to be burgled or the bedroom of a woman to be raided, followed by bloody clashes with the outcasts and drunkards of late nights. After that, the wild roaring of the hot blood in the nerves calms down.
“The police, the bastards!” Alazrak says to himself as he sees their blue cars invading the streets with their shrill sirens.
“If only I had a machine gun to gun them down like dogs.”
Those who had occupied the city after the departure of the invaders had stiffened his inner resolve. As he observes them in every quarter, at every corner, in the squares, schools, factories, park, and beaches, his soul becomes a permanently boiling volcano.
“Those pigs!”
He clenches his teeth and spits in the direction of the blue sky.
In prison, the police officer sarcastically asks, “Hey! How do you find yourself now? Si Alazrak?* How strong is your determination?”
As he stares into the policeman’s face, he glimpses the desire for murder in his eyes.
“You’ve had it? O Alazrak!” he says to himself.
Once they had been given freedom in the city, they had turned into hunters. Orders had emphasized the need to consolidate the authority of the state, and licensed the liquidation of all lawbreakers.
This wild beast, this outlaw. Alazrak disturbs the peace of the jungle.
“Alazrak! You son of a whore, you and your band have fallen. You think the state is like your father, you trampled on his face and walked away? Ha. We’ll show you how you’ll return to your folk a woman who has lost her virginity, you swine, you fornicator.”
The baton now appeared from one of the desk drawers to fall on his head. The second blow hit the central spot at the back of his head, and a red flame erupted, lighting up the world. Alazrak screamed like an animal being slaughtered, “Ayie, ayie, you have killed me, you pig. You dog of the state.”
Fire raced through the veins and nerves, bursting out. The area of the blow started to sting and glow. Crimson shapes began to emerge in the sky of a cruel world.
Alazrak met the third blow with his raised, manacled hands and, like an enraged bull rushing into the arena, he rammed his head and hands into the face and stomach of the police inspector. He tore into his face and broke some of his ribs, then he mercilessly crushed his head as he had once crushed his own father’s.
As a result of this, Alazrak spent three months in the prison hospital, receiving medical treatment and nursing the shame and dishonor of having been raped.
The Nightmare
He felt exhilarated as he watched the city burn. He saw himself soaring in a sky of fire and blood. The fire was consuming the police stations, the jails, the mosques, the shops, and the army barracks. All the symbols and old idols that had crushed and distorted his spirit were burning to ashes in the raging fire. He saw himself dancing naked over green hills. As he dances, pustules, boils, and hateful-smelling germs emerge from his body. When the dancing halts, he slings incendiary missiles to fan the flaming fire. As the flames erupt in waves, so do his desires erupt from their prison, breaking down the barriers that had repressed his spirit, dormant under layers of fire.
Now he is purged and returns to his original nature. And here is the fire, laying bare the desire, awakening it from the bondage of its sleep, and reconciling it with its origins. Here is Alazrak shouting out primitive cries, some meaningful and some not, in this colorful ritual celebration.
The bird of the spirit had taken off from its cage, toward the forest and the sea.
“To hell with you, you oppressive heritage!” The city of nightmare, the city of fear, arrests, hunger and murder, had become a burning hell.
With pagan joy, Alazrak takes wing, passing over the city of ruins in the direction of the forest. And with the tranquillity of a child whose eyes are the color of the sea and the sky, he lies down on the green grass and, naked, sleeps in his mother’s arms.
Sea
Beyond the city stretches the sea. A blue heavenly child, frightening and sublime. The sea and the virgin African forests encircle the city. The city, which Alazrak perceives as a cage or cemetery. He moves in the subterranean alleys, as if he were a beast thrown up by the forest into the city’s compound. In the streets, the cafés, the bars, the interrogation rooms, and the prison cells, he can hear only the sounds of taming, of familiarity, concord, and obedience, and he recoils.
Suddenly he feels nauseated, and he spits. Sometimes in the middle of the street he takes out his penis, tracing with his urine strange obscene words attacking the state, the police, the city, gods and fathers, commands and prohibitions and conventions.
Then he rushes with animal-like screams across the city toward the jungles.
This time, however, the prison wound went deep. Although he feels, as he reclines on a chair in the café, the need to break out of his human condition toward his natural absolute, he now realizes that his swift movements toward freedom have become constrained.
He had to do something to erase the stigma. Although he spent many sleepless nights dreaming of raping his rapists, killing all the city’s policemen, and blowing up the jail, these substitute nightmares, while soothing to the nerves, seemed like a temporary sedative unable to heal the wound.
On this tranquil morning Alazrak feels less disturbed. The rays of the equatorial suns as they pierce the sands, the heads, and the tops of trees seem bearable near the sea.
Lying on a blanket of hot sand under a primitive sun is like a truce. Reposing under this white glare after two years of solitary confinement makes things look brighter and breeds joy. His child’s heart opens up now like a flower at dawn, free and intoxicated among the half-naked bodies of girls and women lying on the sand. Two girls stretch out two meters away from him. One presses her breasts into the hot sand, while the other’s breasts and thighs receive the sun’s kisses.
The two girls whisper to each other in an audible voice while he observes them from the corner of his right eye and listens.
The conversation must now be about him.
“Isn’t that Alazrak?”
“Look at his muscles and his huge chest.”
“Ooh. Yet do you think that he makes love in the way he kills?”
“Will you take a bet on the length of his organ?”
“Listen. Do you think that they really raped him in prison, as it’s rumored?”
The other laughs, mimicking the incident. “In that case his organ must have atrophied and become a cunt.”
“Ha ha ha. In that case he will compete with us in catching men.”
They disappear, laughing together in wanton fashion. They must be imagining him during the act, a man’s rod going in and out of his backside under the eyes of that laughing pig whose ribs he had crushed.
Alazrak’s mood clouds because of these imaginings. The sun, the sea and the two girls become vibrating red patches. The bell in his head has started its loud ringing.
With the spring of a wild cat he finds himself beside them. He opens his legs, cornering them. They are now between his legs. Their eyes face a huge upright figure whose face overflows with bitterness, terror, and hatred.
“Take it, you two. That’s it! It’s yours.”
He had unsheathed his organ and was shaking it with both his hands, long, erect, and tanned by the sun.
“Is he big enough for you, you whores?”
Despite his gratification following the incident by the sea after his release from prison, Si Alazrak did not rest until he had lured into the forest two members of the gang that had raped him. There he extinguished the fire in himself after he had tied them up, then he cut off their penises and left them bleeding among the trees.
Scene of the Kill
Once again, the café. Pavements glitter under the summer sun. The white screen hanging behind the white glass emits white heat. The day is like a shroud. From the half-naked bodies of schoolgirls, whores, and passing women a hot flame radiates, exciting desire. Si Alazrak fidgets on his chair. The hot center of energy expands, and he feels ablaze. The brutal ringing in his head and nerves has started again.
He springs up. A taut body, bursting with energy and desire. A single violent need to kill or rape engulfs the body like a tornado. That’s him following with unsteady steps a girl walking along the pavement. She turns and he follows. Her back is half bare. Every now and then the wind lifts her dress and her red panties glow in the sunshine. Alazrak’s temperature rises and his pulse quickens. He sweats. To regain his balance, he lets out his breath, then whistles. His whistling is well known. He concentrates on observing the rhythmic movement of her backside squeezed in by her underpants, whose outline is seen under the flimsy dress.
She was now within earshot and within reach of his hands.
“O for that smooth marble dome. Are you a woman or a virgin, my beautiful ewe?”
He says this as he presses his palm on her soft swinging bottom. The girl is frightened.
She turns around and they face each other in an empty alley.
“Oh it’s you?”
“The girl from the beach! What a happy coincidence! This is a real wedding, then.”
“Oh have mercy, Si Alazrak.”
His big hand is on her mouth, covering half her face. He gives a voluptuous laugh. He drags her to the dark entrance of a building like a wolf dragging a sheep to his lair.
“If you scream, I will kill you.”
Now the knife was at her neck, the gleam of death flashing from it.
“O Si Alazrak! I appeal to your honor!”
“Did you say my honor? You are my honor now.”
“O Alazrak! I am a young virgin.”
“Not bad. We’ll conduct a little experiment, my ewe, to see which of us is the man and which the woman.”
He was pressing her against the wall while his hand was pulling up her dress and tearing at her panties.
“Take it, my ewe! It’s yours now.”
He took her hand and pressed it into her palm: “I heard that your brother is a policeman and that you complained to him after the incident by the sea. Tell the truth.”
“But he’s never harmed anybody in his life!” said the girl, trembling.
“Did you tell him about the incident or not? Anyone harming Alazrak will never get away with it. Now it’s your turn, next time it will be the turn of your dirty policeman, my ewe.”
He pressed her against the wall. The girl moaned. He plunged his face into hers, then into her bosom, exposing her breasts. She groaned with pain. He was pushing at her, she resisting, compressing her legs together. He arched his back a little, then plunged, forcing her legs open, crushing her supple body between his body and the wall.
“Ooh, my magnificent Alazrak. Be reasonable, I am a virgin. Ah!”
She had loosened up under his thrusts, giving him the opportunity to be free in his movements.
His excitement overflowed and he started lowing like a bull bearing down on a cow.
Their bodies fused together. With a slow, impassioned movement he penetrated her, as a knife penetrates a wound, and a suppressed scream, intermingled with pain and desire, escaped from her.
Alazrak had triumphed. His pulse became normal and the summer seemed to him to stretch like a joyful band of marble white light over the city.
The Emergence of the Spirit
There is Alazrak, a wanted and pursued man. The law wants him while he wanders alone fleeing through the prairies. An obsessed and deviant thief had subverted the dignity of the law and had breached morality. Thus they branded him as they sought him. During his flight across the valleys and forests that encircled the city, he raids farms and isolated houses for food. Some nights he is forced to sleep hungry in the open or in lairs and mountain caves. In the open air among the trees and rocks Alazrak returns to his pure nature. He builds his private kingdom among the rocks. The limitless sky, the wind and the rain, penetrate the veins in his body, unclogging the pores blocked by the contaminated cities, by the stench of the pigs, patriarchal prayers, and the coffinlike cafes, bars, and shops. His spirit is gratified, and he recovers his lost childhood, the childhood that had been violated.
The birds and animals of the wild combine with the spacious silence of land and open air to give him a feeling of joy and peace.
“Who has been more cruel?” he asks himself.
“You chose wrongly, Si Alazrak.”
A mysterious voice reached him from behind. He turned in a panic: “God of the devils, who is there? Man or demon?”
He sprang up, knife in hand.
She was standing on an overhanging rock. He rubbed his eyes to brush off the dream: “Who are you?”
She towered over him like an apparition. Gigantic. Translucent in an enchanting dawn. Her face the color of the prairie flowers. She seemed to him to glow in the halo of light.
“What are you doing here?”
He moved as slowly as a spacewalker. Sat on a rock. Ran his fingers through his floating hair. Opened and shut his eyes with difficulty.
When he looked up, the wind was whistling around the high barren rocks.
She reappeared. Still standing on top of the rocks, the wind blowing through her wheat-colored hair. A pebble she flung to him fell near. She smiled: “Are you deaf or are you mad? Say what you have come to do here.”
He stood up and started walking. He trod the damp grass while dawn was spreading. He could not climb the rock. An invisible force prevented him. The light of the blazing sun exploded in his eyes. He felt something pulling him backward, so he lay down between the blades of grass.
It was a joyful morning. A bird was singing sweetly on a tree. In a short while beautiful colorful birds arrived and began a festival of song and joy. Alazrak was enchanted. A strange overwhelming joy swept through him and he burst out singing and dancing and laughing.
The Secret
The girl of the prairies reappeared. The same distance remained between her and Alazrak. Alazrak was unable to comprehend. He tried to ward off the nightmare in an attempt to distinguish truth from illusion, but he remained lost.
“Alazrak! You’ve made a mistake! The road does not pass through here—your road.”
“From where then?”
She seemed different from city girls. There was a magic halo surrounding her sweet, innocent face. The faces of city girls throb with lust and depravity.
Alazrak had not forgotten her first appearance. It was as if the grass had unfolded to reveal her or that she had fallen from a distant star.
She knew that Alazrak had fled the inferno of the city that demanded his head. When she began talking, her words were strange and surprising. She talked of the history of the murderous city and the misery of people and their hunger, of the violations of the oppressors and the bestiality of their instincts, then went on to talk of the murdered and the martyrs, the prisoners and the exiles.
She related to him the incident of her father’s death under torture and of his burial here in these prairies, and she said that she came here in search of her father’s wandering spirit that demanded revenge.
He heard her repeating words that rang in his depths like a bell: “Love and murder cannot coexist. It is either love or murder.”
She was talking in a subdued tone, while the sunset flowed tenderly on her face, so full of sorrow and beauty.
Alazrak wanted to say something about himself, about his inner torment and his black history, but felt powerless.
Her face inspired confidence and trust. From that translucent, sad face a warm light stretched, engulfing his depths in joy and peace.
Alazrak was transformed as he listened. At one point he felt he had become a different person while she talked to him of the conditions of beggars, hoboes, of naked, hungry people plunging like dogs into garbage bins in search of a crust of bread; while she talked of the insane whose nerves had been destroyed by the war, of the unemployed, of the retired fighters, of the thieves, and of the peasants inhabiting tin shacks while the oppressors, heirs of the invaders, occupied the palaces, the farms, the beaches, and the parks, all the while sucking the blood of the homeland forcibly and violently.
Nowhere was there someone as sad as he was now. His heart almost broke as he listened. He felt impotent and alone, that he had chosen a wrong path. He wondered about the reasons for his loss of direction, where the trauma had originated, and why he had met this apparition at such a late stage.
Within seconds the nightmare was back. He saw the city swept by an earthquake that hurled it to the center of the earth.
At the back of his head, at the center of organic damage, sharp pains arose.
He raised his head, shaking off his anger, and heard her distant and dwindling voice calling on him to return to the city where they would meet. When the phantom had disappeared, he felt as if his heart were bursting through his ribs. He felt that he’d lost something precious that could not be recovered.
Something had dissolved in him during the nights of misery, pursuit, and exile. Alazrak wondered about his situation. Was his existence superfluous, his birth a mistake? Why did he flounder, not knowing how to adjust and harmonize with the world?
He did not find an answer to his questions, either from inside himself or from the outside world. Impatience roused a scream in him that pierced the peace of the prairies: “Mother, oh Mother! Where are you? Take my hand in this darkness. Return me to the womb.”
The echo spread. It spread until it flooded the plains and valleys. Alazrak was now crying like a child who, in losing his mother, had lost all sources of compassion.
Peace
Alazrak did not see the prairie girl after that date, neither did he enter the city again.
At the gates of the city he fell, brought down by a bullet that tore through the back of his head and came out from his forehead. Alazrak fell alone and bloodied, without uttering a cry. He lay sprawled at the gates of the city, then curled up like a child in its mother’s womb and peacefully subsided.
The hunting of the brutalized, the thieves, the deviants, the beggars, the homeless, and the unemployed had begun.
Orders had been issued to purify the city of these pests in the interest of law and order. The killing of Alazrak came as the crowning achievement of the period of purification and as a consolidation of the calm and peace that reigned over the city.