Kamel Daoud - The Meursault Investigation

My father? Oh, I’ve told you everything I know about him. I learned to write his name in my school notebooks, the way you write an address. A family name and nothing else. There’s no other trace of him; I don’t even have an old jacket or a photograph. Mama always refused to describe his looks or his character, to give him a body or share the smallest memory with me. And I had no paternal uncles and no tribe to help reestablish his outline. Nothing. And so, when I was a little boy, I imagined him as rather like Musa, but bigger. Immense, gigantic, capable of fits of cosmic anger, sitting at the world’s border, doing his night watchman’s job. My theory is, it was either weariness or cowardice that caused him to leave. You know, maybe I’ve taken after him. I left my own family before I had one, for I’ve never been married. Sure, I’ve known the love of lots of women, but it never untied the heavy, suffocating knot of secrets that bound me to my mother. After all these years of bachelorhood, here’s my conclusion: I have always nurtured a mighty distrust of women. Basically, I’ve never believed them.

Mother, death, love — everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination. The truth is that women have never been able to free me from my own mother, from the smoldering anger I felt toward her, or to protect me from her eyes, which followed me everywhere for a long time. In silence. As if they were asking me why I hadn’t found Musa’s body or why I’d survived instead of him or why I’d come into the world. And then you have to consider the modesty that was obligatory in those days. Accessible women were rare, and in a village like Hadjout, you couldn’t come across a woman with her face uncovered, much less talk to one. I didn’t have any female cousin anywhere around. The only part of my life that was anything like a love story was what I had with Meriem. She’s the only woman who found the patience to love me and lead me back to life. It wasn’t quite summer yet when I met her, in 1963. Everyone was riding the wave of post-Independence enthusiasm, and I can still remember her wild hair and her passionate eyes, which come and visit me sometimes in insistent dreams. After my relationship with Meriem, I became aware that women would get themselves out of my way, they’d make, so to speak, a detour, as if they could instinctively tell I was another woman’s son and not a potential companion. My appearance didn’t help much either. I’m not talking about my body, I’m talking about what a woman divines or desires in a man. Women have an intuition about what’s unfinished and avoid men who cling to their youthful doubts too long. Meriem was the only one willing to defy my mother, even though she almost never met her and didn’t really know her except from running up against my silences and my hesitations. She and I saw each other about ten times that summer. Then we had a correspondence that lasted several months, and then she stopped writing to me and everything dissolved. Maybe because of a death or a marriage or a change of address. Who knows? There’s an old mailman in my neighborhood who wound up in prison because he’d fallen into the habit of throwing away his undelivered letters at the end of each day.

Today’s Friday. It’s the day closest to death in my calendar. People dress ridiculously, they stroll through the streets at noon still wearing pajamas, practically, shuffling around in slippers as though Friday exempts them from the demands of civility. In our country, religious faith encourages laziness in private matters and authorizes spectacular negligence every Friday. You’d think men observed God’s day by being completely scruffy and slovenly. Have you noticed that people are dressing worse and worse? Without care, without elegance, without concern for the harmony of colors or nuances. Nothing. Old men like me, fond of red turbans, vests, bow ties, or beautiful, shiny shoes, are becoming rarer and rarer. We seem to be disappearing at the same rate as the public parks. It’s the Friday prayer hour I detest the most — and always have, ever since childhood, but even more for the past several years. The imam’s voice, shouting through the loudspeakers, the rolled-up prayer rugs tucked under people’s arms, the thundering minarets, the garish architecture of the mosque, and the hypocritical haste of the devout on their way to water and bad faith, ablutions and recitations. You’ll see this spectacle everywhere on Friday, my friend — you’re not in Paris anymore. It’s almost always the same scene and has been for years. The neighbors start to stir, dragging their feet and moving slow, a long time after their pack of kids, who wake up early and swarm around, like maggots on my body. The new car gets washed and rewashed. Then there’s the sun, which runs its course uselessly on that eternal day, and the almost physical sensation of the idleness of the whole cosmos, reduced to balls that must be washed and verses that must be recited. Sometimes I get to thinking: Now that these people don’t have to go underground and the land is theirs, they don’t know where to go. Friday? It’s not a day when God rested, it’s a day when he decided to run away and never come back. I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough to know what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?

On Friday all the bars are closed and I have nothing to do. People look at me strangely, because despite my age I entreat no one and reach out to no one. It doesn’t seem right to be so close to death without feeling close to God. “Forgive them [my God], for they know not what they do.” With my whole body and all my hands, I’m clinging to this life, which I alone shall lose and which I’m the sole witness to. As for death, I got close to it years ago, and it never brought me closer to God. It only made me long to have more powerful, more voracious senses and increased the depth of my own mystery. The others are marching to death in single file, and me, I’ve come back from it, and I can report there’s nothing on the other side but an empty beach in the sun. What would I do if I had an appointment with God and on the way I met a man who needed help fixing his car? I don’t know. I’m the fellow whose vehicle broke down, not the driver looking for the way to sainthood. Of course, I keep quiet here in the city, and my neighbors don’t like my independence, though they envy it and would be happy to make me pay for it. Children fall silent when I approach them, except for some who mutter insults as I go by, but they’re always ready to run away if I turn around, the little cowards. Centuries ago, I might have been burned alive for my convictions, and for the empty red wine bottles found in the neighborhood Dumpsters. Nowadays, people just avoid me. I feel something close to divine pity for this teeming anthill and its disorganized hopes. How can you believe God has spoken to only one man, and that one man has stopped talking forever? Sometimes I page through their book, the Book, and what I find there are strange redundancies, repetitions, lamentations, threats, and daydreams. I get the impression that I’m listening to a soliloquy spoken by some old night watchman, some assas .