Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-Four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else

FENDA. My chicken little who’s wise to everything, except for the fact that no Gallic sky is going to fall down on your head: once and for all, tell me the truth.

AHMED. The truth! Forsooth! The tooth of Ruth! The trust of our youth! The tattler on the roof! Tell me, truth, what’s true, what T R U, you who are the object of the question posed by the radiant beauty or byoo-THé, spelled T H e, on whom my soul, penetrated by my body, is completely hung up. The truth! What’s the truth? Is it in your soul, that golden capsule made brilliant by the tears in your black eye? Is it in your body, matter and sudden shield, before which I must surrender beneath the empty skies? Or is it, as the poet Rimbaud says, in a soul and a body where beauty is truth and truth is beauty, like the miraculous Fenda who wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

FENDA. Ah! They’re never short on words, men, when in her exactitude a woman puts to them the mother of all questions. And behold them raising, before their very eyes, as if in the middle of a sand storm, terrifying and pontificating smoke clouds of rhetoric! The truth is never in the cunning running of your words, my little Ahmed. It isn’t a fox. The truth initially happens, and then you have to follow its trace, like this.

Fenda’s improvisation: to which Ahmed is invited as the appearance of a truth, while Fenda manipulates him in the role of the one who makes this truth last.

AHMED (completely dazed). Oh, wow! Take pity on me, please! We’ll never get there like this! It’s too much! Too much truth all at once! In little doses, truth should come! In little flasks! Listen, we’re going to play the game of truth. We’re going to create a theater of truth.

FENDA. Oh! Filthy little desert fox hiding under the rocks! The theater! Can the truth have anything to do with the theater? It’s in the innermost depths of the heart, truth is, it isn’t in the lie of the mask! You’re always concocting parables out of perfectly obvious things, and then no one can tell anymore if they’re the truth or the mask of witchcraft that repels the truth. The truth that struts like a peacock is a bird without feelings!

AHMED. But isn’t it through thousands of errors, thousands of lies, that, from century to century, the truth has emerged? And my acting sums up these centuries of fiction! It’s very simple! I perform something for you in total silence, and you tell me what it is. Thus, through words you’ll see right through what my masked body both shows and hides.

FENDA (a bit sulky). The one fine day when you might just come out and say things plainly is not marked in the calendar of my soul.

AHMED. But it is in the wood of my mask. Here, check this out, for example.

AHMED. Isn’t that a truth? And now this.

FENDA. I have the impression that you’re saying, you horrible fathead, that if a man loves a woman, the way things should work is that she should be the one to declare herself first, or else he’ll be cooked in the casserole of love like a bunch of parsnips.

AHMED. The part she snips? The snips that she parses? Is that not an excellent truth? And this.

FENDA. Oh! Abominable monkey of the palm trees! Cheating cashier in the supermarkets of love! Now you’re saying that if the ardent desire for a beautiful woman’s body gets mixed with love, the situation is so irrevocable as to warrant the precaution of another woman to help one keep one’s distance. Evil pig! Polygamous zebra!

AHMED. Ah! My splendid sexed justice! The writer Tolstoy, prose king of all the Russias, said that he wouldn’t write the truth about women until just before he closed his coffin lid. The last lid. You see?

FENDA. Crudenuderude! It’s all crudenuderude, your truth! Especially nude, though, as far as I can tell, far from new. And who is she, this other nude who makes you keep your distance? Would you go crawling under the skirts of la Pompestan? The man who’s afraid of all love seeks refuge in the most unlikely of puppet theaters! La Pompestan would suit you just fine, you frightened rogue, you licentious deadbeat; she’d offer you plenty of shelter from the prosecution of your truths where the sun doesn’t shine!

AHMED. And now this.

FENDA. OK, now, you’ve reached the very summit of truth! The superior artifice of the pathetic male! You’re saying that your love for me renders you mute in regard to anything related to the living life of this love itself? Is that right? The more it’s tall and strong like a tree that stretches to the stars, the more you need to seal it shut beneath an aura of mysterious life?

And you’re insisting on it, you delightful acrobat of amorous cowardice! You’re saying that the power of love, in its acts and words, ought to be coupled with evasion and dereliction? Who’d have imagined one could indulge in such baseness behind a mask? Your truth, cutie-pie, is as beautiful as the hairy snout of a warthog!

AHMED. Who said the truth has to be beautiful, anyway? Or good? A few classical philosophers who definitely weren’t in love with a radiant and judicial black woman! Who never appeared in court! So, from afar, just like that, they said that the True is also the Beautiful and the Good! But in front of you, my twinkling summer night! What would they have said then, those insulated optimists?

FENDA. They would have said this.

FENDA. That’s not exactly what I’m saying.

FENDA. You’re not quite getting it, my Ahmed, since with you the cunning idea is always stronger than true intellect.

AHMED. Well I’ll be a wooden puppet! So you’re saying that no matter what a man does, no matter how cunning his evasion and his wariness, a woman in love is the guardian of his truth? Of the man’s truth? Do you really think you can demonstrate this horrific point? My man’s truth, even if I keep it in the dark day after day, you’re its guardian?

FENDA. You’re not too far off, but you still haven’t hit the jackpot.

AHMED (getting down on one knee in front of Fenda). Now I get it! Bravo! I lay down my arms! I guess I’ll have to eat humble pie! Naked, with a hair shirt, and a rope around my neck.

FENDA. Yuck! With a hair shirt! That’s a real turn-on! Naked, OK, maybe. The rope, if worse comes to worst, alright, let’s see what we can do with it. But have you understood the truth this time? Do you see where it’s still at work, like the churning of the streets in which men and women are constantly running into and connecting with each other?

AHMED. How did you manage to figure out my most private thought, which I’ve been spending most of my time keeping as far away from you as possible?

FENDA (kissing him). It’s not for nothing that they’ve said it many times. And even no-good philosophers like you, wise guys who know how to seduce with the charm of words, have suspected as much.

AHMED. What have they suspected?

FENDA. That the truth is a woman.

AHMED. Oh, right! The truth is a naked woman emerging from a well!

FENDA. I wouldn’t mind going back there.

AHMED. Back where?

FENDA. Back naked into the wellspring. With you.

AHMED. With you naked on the bedsprings! Certainly, my radiant justice beneath truth recumbent! Naked in the wellspring of the bedsprings!

FENDA. But remember! However tightly you embrace it, a truth grows and spreads out, like a lake after the long sweet rains!

AHMED. A lot of good it’ll do her to brag and swagger around like the conqueror. Even conquered, even brought to my knees, and nonetheless, and regardless. As far as the true truth is concerned, I’m not going to say it until I close the lid!