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

AHMED. I’m going to tell you a horrifying story. A story that’ll make your hair stand on end. A story next to which slasher movies filled with gore and chain saws and zombies whose skin is falling off in ragged strips filled with stinking pustules are like delicious little cherry tarts. I promise you. Next to my story if you were watching television and you saw a baby-monster with teeth like needles, covered with hair the color of rotten peaches, who’s just been born devouring its mother’s breasts, from which the blood is splattering all over the place, and then gouging out the eyes of its cute little older sister with a screwdriver, you’d laugh your head off because of the contrast.

Once upon a time, in Sarges-les-Corneilles, there was a demon. This demon lived on Dog-breath Street, appropriately enough. He was a demon of the cities, not like the demon in the tales priests tell, who lives in hell with a pitchfork and a tail. No, your everyday, familiar kind of demon. He was afraid, because the mother of all vices is fear. Someone who’s always afraid loves crushing the weak, if he ever encounters any of them, preferably by arranging for them to be unexpectedly afflicted by all the suffering that the anonymous and obscene activity of the forces of order can produce. He was lazy, because the lazy have an abject hatred of anyone who’s doing something with their life. He would shout everywhere that he was French, along the lines of “I, sir, am French”; because those who, to feel like they exist, need to hide behind an adjective of this type become informers and torturers at the drop of a hat. He secretly hated himself, because someone who doesn’t find anything to like in himself finds everything in others despicable. He trembled in front of his wife, a demonic shrew in her own way, as mean and bitter as they come, because men who swagger around in the neighborhood bar telling stories about how they punched some towel head’s lights out and who think they’ve got to keep showing off everywhere—this is their favorite metaphor—how big their balls are, go back to their houses terrorized, if only because their shrews know that these famous balls aren’t exactly all they’re cracked up to be—far from it. Because since the days when they started pickling them in all the gallons of pastis they’ve drunk, they’ve shrunk enormously. Assuming, of course, that they’d been big to begin with, which nobody can verify. In short, he was a red-blooded patriotic monster.

I’d often had occasion to beat him with my stick, just to avenge the shining world for all the disgusting filth he’d infected it with. But I was getting a little tired of always having to beat him. Terror eventually wearies the people’s avenger. I was trying to figure out how to destroy him once and for all. Kill him? No way! That’s not my style. I would have liked to have broken him down from inside, so that he’d be eaten up by his own mental acid.

One day, not far from the exit of the school, I see him talking in his unctuous way to little Aïcha. I should explain that Aïcha is Ibrahim Boubakar’s kid; he’s totally crazy about her. Ibrahim’s a street cleaner in Sarges-les-Corneilles, a terrific guy, really, the kind of guy you’re lucky if you meet once or twice in your life. A very meditative and serious thinker, with a calm experience of life and an inner certainty that revives you when you talk with him. The girl’s mother died two years ago, and my friend Ibrahim Boubakar is raising his daughter all by himself. Of course, when I see the demon offering candy to Aïcha, I think what you’re thinking. And then I think, no! The demon isn’t one of those small-time playground lechers! He’s not your friendly neighborhood child molester! So what’s he up to? I’ll spare you the details: Ahmed is equal to any challenge. Anyway, I manage to overhear the conversation of the demon and little Aïcha. Several times, in fact. And this is when all the hair on my head stands on end and when we enter into the realm of horror. Because I understand that the demon had no intention of touching Aïcha, none whatsoever! No, instead, he was explaining to her, calmly, that it would be very funny if she told her father that a man had been coming to pick her up at the school for quite some time, and that he’d strip naked and then take her into his bed, and that she too would strip naked, and that he’d do this and that to her, and that she’d learned all sorts of new things about men and ladies, and so forth. With a highly seductive voice and lots of candy, he succeeded in teaching her her lesson. And I realized that the kid bought it! I saw that she was very tempted to tell her father such an extraordinary story! Her father whom she really wanted to amaze for once in her life. Because she knew that her father loved her more than anyone, but she wasn’t sure if he was amazed enough by her. And the demon would score more points every day, since she was becoming more and more tempted. He’d explain to her that maybe her father would be really angry, but that she absolutely mustn’t tell him that these were just made-up stories, because then she’d look ridiculous. And Aïcha was afraid of only one thing in the world, namely, looking ridiculous, especially in front of her father. And then the demon would go back to filling her head with juicy and plausible details, which were increasingly precise, and she’d listen to him like he was telling her the tales of Hans Christian Andersen that had somehow been hidden from her up until this point. And I sensed that very soon, to amaze her father, she was going to tell him all of these dreadful stories. And that they’d be so precise and so dreadful that no one would be able to imagine that she’d made it all up. And I imagined Aïcha’s father, my friend Ibrahim Boubakar, who didn’t really believe in the existence of Evil, going mad, between the utter desolation of his universe and the murderous desire that would contaminate his great wise man’s soul.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to let that happen. But I was worried about the method. Beatings with the stick didn’t do much good. Should I go tell Ibrahim? Just knowing what had happened, even though his daughter hadn’t been touched, would have spoiled his life for the rest of his days. Denouncing people to the police is something I absolutely forbid myself. Anyway, if I were to go to the police, it’s me they’d arrest, no matter what I told them. To cut to the chase, I raced to the school, where I found Aïcha and the demon, who, sensing that success was near, was licking his chops over his final lessons. The demon, thinking I’m about to beat him again, tries to flee. I hold him firmly, very firmly, by his tie. And I say: “Aïcha! You’re not going to breathe a word of anything this awful fellow has told you! If you say anything about it to your father, even just once, even just a little bit, I’ll explain to him that you’re just repeating lies this awful fellow has taught you while giving you candy, and you’ll look ridiculous! Do you understand? Everybody in Sarges-les-Corneilles will make fun of you. So now, run home!” Which she did, no questions asked, and I realized that, with her fear of ridicule, she was going to keep her lips double-sealed. “As for you, Demon, it’s just you and me now. I ought to throw you into the river with your pockets full of lead. But I’ve come up with something worse: if you don’t bury all this in the deepest silence, I’m going to tell your wife and I’ll furnish proof, that you chase after little girls, and, what’s more, after little African girls. Plus, I’ll warn Ibrahim Boubakar, who’ll kill you like the rat that you are.” The idea of the wife had come to me during the night, after I’d gotten over the horror that had paralyzed me at first, because I too, taught by Ibrahim Boubakar, sometimes stop thinking that Evil exists. You see, the demon’s wife is the demon’s contradiction. His inner, intimate contradiction, the one that constitutes him as a demon. On the one hand, he’s really a demon only because what’s closest to him, what shares his demonic existence, is made of nothing more than hatred, avarice, and terror. If he had a nice little wife that he loved, how could he be a demon? But, on the other hand, he’s so weak in the face of his wife, who has a well-established right to hate him every day, that his demonic resources fail him whenever she spits her venom at him. His shrew is indispensable if he’s going to be a true demon of the cities, yet, at the same time, she thwarts his demonic zeal by demoralizing him and reflecting back to him the image of a wretched coward who trembles from head to toe beneath a woman’s insults. There’s a very great philosopher, a true German professor, who knew everything, and even the whole of the Whole, who said: Each thing develops according to its inner contradiction. The demon, too, develops according to his inner contradiction, I thought during the night, and his contradiction is his wife.

Once I’d spoken with him, the demon, whom I was still holding tight with his tie, was giving me this funny look, his little blue albino pig eyes completely shrunken to pinpoints sitting right next to each other. He said to me: “I know you! You’re not going to see Boubakar, because you don’t want to disturb that Negro’s life. And you’re not going to see my wife, because you know she’ll never believe an Arab.” That disconcerted me a little, right there. I’d forgotten that a demon, a real one, necessarily has flashes of psychological lucidity. Completely disgusted by the mere physical contact with him, I let him go, and he took off like a bat out of hell.

A few days later, what do I see? The demon chatting up Aïcha again. It’s only fair to say that the kid looked mistrustful; she looked wary. Meanwhile, I don’t waste any time. I run to Dog-breath Street, I race up the stairs, and I ring the demon’s doorbell. The shrew opens the door, I stick my foot in the door, and I blurt out to her that her husband is busy seducing little African girls with candy as they’re leaving school. As she starts to open her mouth, I immediately add: “I know, I know, you can’t believe an Arab, but you don’t have to believe, all you have to do is look. Follow me!” Her wickedness getting the better of her, because, being the opposite of Boubakar, she believes only in Evil, she’s running behind me all the way down Dog-breath Street. We hide behind a tree and we clearly see the demon offering Aïcha an assortment of orange lollipops, which, thanks to her fear of ridicule, the little girl is eyeing with suspicion. “So,” I say to the shrew, “is your husband doing this out of charity to the poor?” Now she too gives me a funny look, with the same blue albino pig eyes as the demon, but metallic to boot, like coins in the cash register of her round head. And then she hightails it out of there. I also had the pleasure of seeing that Aïcha hadn’t taken any of the orange lollipops and suddenly ditched the demon.

And you know what happened next? A few days later? Well, the shrew fed the demon rat poison. And, since he really was a rat, all it took was one little dose of rat poison to kill him just like that. And she, the shrew, got twenty years in prison. And since they shut her up in a cell with some tough cookies who made her life absolutely miserable, she couldn’t take it anymore and so one fine day she hanged herself.

Here, then, is the triumph of the tremendous German professor I was just chatting with you about, Hegel. This Hegel not only explained that each thing developed according to its inner contradiction but also showed that this development led each thing to its death. By virtue of drawing on its contradiction, the thing dies. This is why he used to say: everything that comes into being deserves to perish. You see how it works! The demon’s contradiction is his wife. He lived off of her, as a demon, and he died from her. It makes sense. And as for deserving to perish, well, he was a real champion in that category. But it gets even better! This same Hegel used to say that contradiction itself, that which leads the thing to its death, must also die. Ultimately, contradiction is itself contradicted. As the shrew had clearly understood! As the contradiction of the demon, she made him die, but she had to die too. The shrew hanging from the bars of her cell is the contradiction of contradiction! And do you know what Hegel called that, the contradiction of contradiction? He called it Absolute Knowledge. Because it’s the death of death. If you see a repulsive shrew hanging from the bars of a prison cell, rejoice! You’ve at least seen a little piece of the Absolute.