The Man Who Saw the Sole of His Left Foot in a Cracked Mirror
At a quarter to five on Sunday afternoon—as shown by his wrist-watch the hands of which lit up when night fell—the weather was unbearably hot, but what was he to do? The weather—captive—was doomed to be as hot as hell-fire, while he—free—was doomed to live in such weather. Each of them, for some reason or other he did not know and had no desire to pursue, hated the other but they were at the same time shackled to each other like the blacks and the whites in New York. There is no escaping one’s doom.
The most absurd thing about this heat was that it imitated the cold: it pierced the skin with feverish pricks when, instead of the burning stings that caused the body to retreat hedgehog-wise into itself, springs of viscid water oozed out of it. A week ago he had discovered by chance that Nadia—who was more or less his wife—had been unfaithful to him with Hamid, his handsome friend with the blond mustache and the laugh that hung with surprising persistence between the elongated nose, as though borrowed from Cyrano de Bergerac, and the slightly drooping lower lip, thus providing his evenly spaced teeth with the chance of showing off their sparkle. It had occurred to him more than once to ask him the name of the toothpaste he used, but when he was about to utter the words he finally renounced the idea. Of what importance was it? Had his brother Waleed been in his place, he would have asked Hamid the very moment the question-mark passed through his mind. He was constantly sowing question-marks around himself so that the world might seem to him a garden verdant with questions. No. The matter was not one of doubts alone. Why doubt or not doubt when he possessed enough bits of evidence to keep his certainty warm? And because certainty is comforting, he felt nothing out of the ordinary about the matter. To be exact, he was not concerned with feeling anything, either ordinary or out of the ordinary. During this week, he had twice caught himself in the act of flagrantly asking, “Is there still the possibility of feeling something—anything?” He awaited the answer. But nothing in him gave utterance. Within him silence had for long been howling, as though it were an unknown wind in a lost desert. Was there some new epidemic that had spread through the world extinguishing the lights and gagging the feelings inside those born of Adam and Eve? Well and good, the head has landed on the axe—or the axe on the head. He knows not how they say it exactly, this phrase as oddly constructed as one of Salvador Dali’s pictures, utterly abstract. Everything in the world has a function, a role, yet even so it is something abstract. A world complete in itself in which is to be found beauty, the square, sex, the straight line, fire and death. Cigarettes. Hamid’s nose. Air. Water. Nadia’s navel. Music. The sky. Waleed’s questions. Newspapers. Reality. And in reality Nadia’s infidelity has become a reality. An abstract something that breathes with him this unbearably hot weather. What should he do? Pretty Nadia was still—despite Hamid—pretty; when she winked, flirted, and smiled, all the stones of the pyramids of Khufu smiled—and particularly in those moments which, despite their being repeated, are always newly created and in which the awareness of pleasure mingles with the unawareness of pain, and which at that moment soak up everything in the rose-colored room with the large cracked mirror fixed alongside the window, painted in such somber hue as though suffering a perpetual bashfulness. How many times had he caught sight, from a fleeting glance in the mirror, of the sole of his left foot as it painfully thudded against the bed with the spasms of his body. Had it not been for this cracked mirror he would never have succeeded in knowing that the sole of his left foot was so white. And his friend Hamid is still—despite Nadia—his friend with whom he spends long nights loafing about the endless streets of Cairo, chattering away like a waterfall. Yet he was as light as a feather, one didn’t feel him. From time to time he told him some jokes in which brains and thighs were stripped bare, in the manner of an English lord, rolling the words on his tongue in drawling Arabic.
Sweat oozed out incessantly from under his skin, flowing down his broad forehead and pervading the furrows of his face; beads of it rained down, drop by drop, on to his thick eyebrows in a monotonous rhythm, like the sighings of Abdel Wahhab in his song “The Gondola”: his eyes would fill up and stop focusing till he was almost unable to see, when he would sluggishly move his hand with the handkerchief, irritably mopping up the sweat. For two years he didn’t remember—despite everything he related, guessed and knew—ever using his handkerchief to wipe away even one solitary tear flowing from his eyes. That was true. For two years he had not known tears: the dryness of indifference had befallen him. Most likely this was connected with his twin brother Waleed who had not returned from his ill-fated trip into the desert. It was said that thirst was the cause—and God knows best. No more than six minutes younger than him, he was, nevertheless, stronger. This was neither false modesty nor a stupid desire for futile lamentation. In this Waleed there dwelt the courage of Samson and Socrates, of Saladin, Byron, and Guevara in their love of life and their disdain of death. Waleed used to see millions of things that he himself did not see, and sometimes he would make fun of him because he saw things with his eyes alone—and the eye does not see everything in things. A rose is a rose for all people at all times, even ours, and in every place even in the desert; but a rose in the eyes of Waleed was a-thousand-and-one things: Nefertiti’s eyes, the melodies of Bach, the sun’s kiss on the sea at its setting on the platinum beach of Agami, the murmuring off love you” between a man and a woman. When he used to dream of a morrow in which people would be as equal as the teeth of a comb, his voice would become white. When the three men came and knocked at his door one night as he was on the point of going off to Nadia in the rose-colored room, they entered unhurriedly, lowering their eyelids and softly dragging their feet. This was because they either thought of themselves—rightly or wrongly—as angels of mercy, or because they feared to wake somebody up, though the house was as empty and desolate as a new grave not yet inhabited by the corpse of a man. They cleared their throats more than once in no fixed order, and it was perhaps this that had put them in a state of disjointed hemming and hawing, like the instruments of an orchestra tuning up. They exchanged colorless glances. This it appears was the signal for one of them to stand up. He lifted his body from his chair and surprised him with its great height. Where had he been hiding it? He looked at the man, at the agitated Adam’s apple in the middle of his neck with the swelling blue vein. Had Waleed been at hand he would have asked him in no uncertain terms: “What’s all this about, my dear fellow?” But Waleed was not present. This man had come with the two other men instead of him. Three in exchange for one. The tallest of them was standing upright in front of him, like an actor on a stage without an audience. Who does he think he is? Most likely Othello, reciting from memory cadenced words that bring to the car the sound of drumbeats and the blaring of a brass trumpet. Between one moment and the next, the name Waleed was squeezed in without relevance. With a little effort he would have been able to understand something of what the man was saying, but he didn’t attempt to. Why? He didn’t ask himself. At last, when one after the other they had pressed his hand, they presented him with Waleed’s watch, the hands of which lit up at nightfall. Handling it gently, he looked at it hard, and shook it twice to test it before quietly fixing it round his wrist. They were visibly much affected. Why? Likewise he did not ask himself. He shook them by the hand with a neutral glance and walked with them a couple of steps, nay three, toward the door. When the threshold had become a trustworthy frontier between him and them which they would not step across again, he said to them with a smile which, it seemed from the clouds that drifted about their faces, they did not receive kindly: I thank you. Now I have a watch with hands which light up at nightfall,” and they went away. For some moments he stayed where he was. The door was open to the darkness of the street. The light in the house was ravishing the furniture whose anarchy drew out from it, on to the floor and walls, dead, droll shadows. A minute or two of the silence of nothingness, then with firm steps he moved outside, shutting the door behind him on the light with its dead, droll creations, and hurried off to Nadia. That night he enjoyed more than once the sight of the sole of his left foot clearly seen on the surface of the cracked mirror in the rose-colored room. And when Nadia languidly asked him, as she redid her hair which had the color and taste of Italian espresso coffee, about the watch he was wearing and was it new, he didn’t know how to answer her. However, in a toneless, enigmatic voice he said to her, “Its hands light up at nightfall.” He wasn’t sad. Likewise he wasn’t happy.
The sun’s rays were loitering here and there with provoking slowness, like a policeman on his beat who must return to the station with some customers. Its blazing imprints lay on the fronts of the houses, the branches of trees, the lamp-posts that had not yet awakened, and on some turnings up and down which ears, bicycles, lorries and pedestrians’ feet made their way to and fro. Ugh! This life never stops, is indefatigable—and his eyes fell on a compact mass of light reflected from a shop window displaying all sorts of ties. With suppressed irritation he stopped, rubbing his eyes, and without knowing it found himself gazing at the window. Behind the glass stood an elegant man. elegant as a picture in a fashion magazine, examining dozens of tics, gripped by the confusion of having to choose. Choosing is always difficult, sometimes impossible, and in general causes problems. “Any tie’s all right,” he once said to Nadia when she noticed he wasn’t good at choosing ties. Hamid’s ties were always very carefully chosen. That day a week ago, when he had met him on the stairs of Nadia’s house, hurrying to the street as he finished doing up a couple of buttons of his gray trousers, his tie was hanging down on his chest, the tie with its desert-sand colors and scattered oases of green, and he had smelt Nadia’s intimate smell on it. She had certainly tied it for him as she had kissed him and said “Hurry.” “Speed is the hallmark of the age,” Waleed was always saying. He had asked Hamid nothing; it was Hamid who had asked him with brilliantly contrived surprise, “You! Where are you off to?”
“To Nadia.”
“Ah! Nadia lives here?”
Without having asked him for an explanation, by gesture, word, or look, Hamid had voluntarily justified his presence in the house by saying that he was looking for an empty flat and began weaving detail after detail: How he’d known. Where he’d come from. What he’d found. Even the name of the agent he hadn’t failed to mention. All the while, he had stood unconcernedly pretending to listen. He had wanted to pat Hamid on the shoulder and whisper to him, “Everything you say is plausible. I believe you. I would believe you even if you were to tell me you were naked with Nadia on the bed waiting to board the Giza train when it came into the rose-colored room through the window,” but between wanting and doing lie impassable seas and deserts. Finally, angelic silence had descended upon Hamid. He had heard him swallowing his spittle before asking, “What’s the time? I’m late for an important appointment.” He had stretched out to him his hand with the watch whose hands lit up at nightfall. Hamid, casting a hurried glance at them and jumping with the nimbleness of a rabbit toward the street, had said, “So long, my friend.” Nodding his head without a word, he had begun climbing the stairs, step by step, to Nadia. Hamid had been in every corner of the rose-colored room: on the bed, behind the door, by the window. He had not only been conscious of him when he caught sight of the sole of his left foot in the cracked mirror as the bed gave its traditional tremors, but it had seemed to him that he had asked himself. Did Hamid also see the sole of his left foot? He didn’t know what had happened after that because he had sunk into a deep sleep from which he had awoken only when Nadia had roused him in the morning with a cup of coffee. It hadn’t been quite hot enough, as at all other times, but he had drained it to the bottom and gone down to the street. In the street, girls, carts, cats, soldiers, old men, dogs, and traffic lights had all been frenziedly propelled into motion with the speed of someone convinced he is living the last day in the life of mankind. On the pavement there had suddenly sprung up before him the fat newspaper seller—as though an enchanted earth had cracked open to reveal him. When he had waved in his face a newspaper crowned with red banner headlines and shouted, “They’ve got to the moon,” he remembered that he should go to his work at the tram company. He went. What could he do? He had to go.
The weather began collecting its forces of cool air and rebelling against the heat. The strong, lofty sun remained the overlord, the ruler, for the whole of the day, its first steps of withdrawal toward its ordained defeat beginning with the counter-attack of the night. Several soft breezes took courage to stir and the small branches of trees shook. Little birds twittered during the moment when the blood of the wounded sun was spilt across the horizon. Blood—what is now the color of blood? Is blood still that warm dark red color or has it changed? He had not yet seen Waleed’s blood, so how could he know? But this thing squirming about in front of him like a snake on the asphalt road, as though searching out a prey, is it not blood? And this crazy lorry, disappearing with the devilish bend of the road, has thrown to the ground the man with the white gallabiya and hair and has gone on its way. Inevitably it has gone on its way, the road being clear and unblocked in front of it. From under the white gallabiya emerges this red snake that runs toward him with strange defiance. Everything happens with meticulous method as though previously arranged. What should he do? The darkness of night falls above his head. Who is it who calls to him “Help me?” Whence comes that soft husky voice, reminiscent of Nadia’s the day he discovered her infidelity with Hamid? “The man’s blood has been soaked up by the dust.” What’s this? What’s happened? Where is the man with his white gallabiya and his red snake? The sun too has fled. The sweat has dried. Those who are running and shoving each other aside as though the end of the world has come, as though the war of Good and Evil has broken out, thrust him once to the right, once to the left, the only word on their lips being “ambulance,” while he remains rooted to the ground unable to move. Millions of ants creep in single file under his skin with the army of darkness whose moment of victory has drawn near. Bells ring out jubilantly from afar as though being tolled at the end of the world, their reverberation growing louder and louder until they seem to be ringing deep inside him. Has his head changed into a belfry? Voices shout out, “Careful—What’s wrong?—The man’s gone crazy.” Voluntarily or involuntarily, he was running forward two steps, turning around, standing for a moment listening, then running, then coming back, then standing, then running. The voices—and with them an unknown and faceless enemy—were chasing him. almost catching him. They did actually catch him. He felt a sharp blow on his right side. The voices shrieked “God almighty!” He opened his eyes to see what had happened, and he gently brushed against the sky, upright, high and faraway with the moon. The stars, though, were so close that scarcely a hand’s span separated them from him. What if I were to stretch out my arm and pluck a star to give to Nadia? No, to Waleed. But where to find Waleed in the lost desert? Should he ask the three men? They wouldn’t know and even if they did they wouldn’t say. No. He would give it to Nadia to hang above the cracked mirror or even on the end of Hamid’s nose. Certainly not. He would put it in safekeeping to give to the one who would certainly go one day and bring back Waleed. What is that moving above his head? Where is his head? Had the stars begun to have gates that opened and closed? Mouths with tongues were molding words, screwing them up into balls and hurling them into his face. He heard, or imagined he heard, a voice with bent back, leaning on a stick: “What a life! The ambulance came to the rescue of someone and ran over someone else.” He understood nothing. Who was the ambulance supposed to rescue? And who had the ambulance run over? And since when did ambulances come? A full, hot hand landed on his forehead, as though it were a left-over from the unbearable heat; in a green voice it said, “How are you feeling?” He wanted to open his mouth to say something he wanted to say, but he only opened his eyes again. He didn’t know whether they spoke or not. When he heard another voice like his own asking the time, he moved his hand so as to indicate his watch. Strange, it was not the same movement of his hand as he was accustomed to make whenever he consulted his watch. He saw nothing but total darkness. Where is the watch? He felt for it with the fingers of his other hand. It was there, lying securely round his wrist. At that moment a screaming buzzed in his ears; he felt it issuing from something awakening suddenly deep inside him. Most assuredly it was his own scream. Night has fallen and the hands of the watch do not light up. His shrieks were continuous, like the screaming of a newborn child: “Why, Waleed? Why?” The “why” stuck to his tongue, violently bumping against the wall of night, imbued with every desire to destroy it. When they raised him up on the stretcher to the ambulance, they noticed a tear welling up in the twin lakes of his eyes. A young woman, with a radiant expression and clad in black, who had squeezed her body into the middle of the crowd, whispered, “The young man, poor thing, is crying.” No one, though, knew that it was his first tear for two years.