Rawi Hage - Cockroach

In the second letter, the writer seemed to reply to something the professor must have hinted about money, poverty, and their relationship. But everything was dismissed in a smooth, complacent romantic phrase: Ah, les artistes et l’argent, toujours la souffrance pour l’art et l’amour, and the letter proceeded to talk about a luscious meal that was presented to the writer by le chef René lui-même, sur une terrasse sublime avec une vue très agréable. Le poisson frais et la dame au visage ridé . The professor must have eaten his shoes from envy and hunger. The writer signed only L. at the end, not even a return address. She reminded me of Sylvie, a piano teacher I had met at the gourmet store where I worked before my rope incident. I used to deliver Sylvie’s groceries. One time she offered me wine and pâté — or was it foie gras? — and I woke up the next morning in her sensual silk sheets.

Sylvie did not walk, she floated, her expensive silk nightgown trailing behind her as if it came with its own breeze. For her, everything had to be beautiful. She had to live a permanent life of beauty, and everything that surrounded her had to have a nostalgic or poetic meaning to it. Her soft voice, her stylish dresses, her good manners concealed a deep hidden violence and a resentment of nature’s indifference to her ephemeral existence. We always met in sophisticated places. There were always dinners, cocktails, theatre. I soon became fed up with her make-believe life. I was bored. I hung around for a while because of the food, the wine and cheese. But any hint of misery from me, of problems or violence, was automatically dismissed and replaced with something happy, light, or pretty. Everything was described as charmant, intéressant, d’une certaine sensibilité, la texture . All her friends, too, lived in a state of permanent denial of the bad smells from sewers, infested slums, unheated apartments, single mothers on welfare, worn-out clothing. No, everything had to be perfect, every morsel of food had to be well served — presentation, always presentation, the ultimate mask.

I slept with all of Sylvie’s friends. It was easy — all I had to do was call them and ask something about un regard que j’ai senti de votre part et je voulais savoir si je m’imaginais des choses . It worked on all of them. Stabbing one another in the back was fine as long as it was for romance, a story — in short, something presentable. One night when we all went for a dinner at a French restaurant, I stole their wallets, walked through the restaurant kitchen, and took off out the back door. I took the cash, tossed the empty wallets in the gutter, and went down to the Copa, sat at the bar, and drank.

Of course, Sylvie and her friends knew that I had done it. They knew perfectly well that it was I who had slipped my hand into their leather bags. None of them said a word; not even their boyfriends dared to confront me. They knew that I would slash their tires, enter their homes, poison their dogs, and break their stereos. They knew because I had showed them my scar. I made up stories about it. The preppie boyfriends felt that they were in the company of a noble savage, and they liked it. One of them, Jean-Mathieu his name was, the son of some big-shot industrialist, invited us once to his apartment in Île Ste-Hélène. He lived in one of those expensive apartments with faux shantytown architecture. While everyone was dancing and sniffing coke downstairs on the kitchen counter, he called me upstairs to his room. He closed the door, went to his closet, and said, Regarde, mon ami. Ça, mon ami, c’est pour ceux qui want to mess with me. He pulled out a Magnum, a beauty of an arm, all silver. It must have been worth thousands of dollars. He pointed it at my face and started to laugh. The fucker was high. His hand extended, he was smiling at me, playful.

I smiled back, looked him in the eyes, and faked a loud laugh, leaning my body away from the gun barrel. I pretended to admire the gun and slowly reached for his wrist and pointed the weapon towards the bed. Then I pulled his face towards me and said: Did you ever show that to your mommy? His expression changed as I started to twist his arm slowly. He got confused. I kept my reaction ambiguous, smiling at him, giggling, talking about what a beauty the gun was. Then I said, This beauty, lâche-le , I want to see it. I took it slowly out of his hand. I popped out the magazine quickly and pulled back the top, and the bullet in the firing chamber jumped onto the bed. I pressed the button and the chamber snapped back to its original position. I pointed it at Jean-Mathieu, and said, Now it is safer to put in someone’s face, no? He nodded, gazing at me with coke-glazed eyes. I found the bullet on top of the bed and inserted it back in the magazine. Shoved the magazine in. Pushed the security button down. Then I opened the closet, grabbed one of Jean-Mathieu’s cotton shirts, wiped the gun with it, and, laughing, I said to him, A baby like that has to be well taken care of, no? We do not want any fingerprints on it. I held on to the gun with the shirt and put it back on the shelf. Then I patted my palm on Jean-Mathieu’s face like a godfather, and said, Nice gun. You should always be careful where you aim it. Let’s go downstairs before the bowl with the white stuff gets lost in the noses of those brats.

I was the one who provided Sylvie’s friends with drugs. I bought the low-quality stuff from Big Derrick and over-charged the friends for it. They were corrupt, empty, selfish, self-absorbed, capable only of seeing themselves in the reflection from the tinted glass in their fancy cars. The women lived a hedonistic existence, not caring what the boys did as long as their surroundings were fashionable and presentable. I despised them; they admired me.

THERE WAS NOTHING IN the professor’s letters but lost, empty lives and illusions of escape from life’s ugliness. As I read them, I thought how some people must despise how they look. They must vomit when they see themselves naked, filthy, and wrinkled. They must be horrified to realize that they are made of skin, flesh that can be cut, boiled, and eaten, that they perspire, that fluid runs through them, that always, whatever they eat, no matter how presentable it is, the food that comes on fancy plates, that is savoured as it is illuminated by small candles on red tablecloths, that gives off the aroma of spices, will always, always be transformed into something ugly and repulsive. They are obsessive about masking their humanity, their dung, their droppings, their sweat, their curved toenails that grow and never stop growing. They despise this world and therefore they are engaged in a constant act of covering themselves up — covering up their faces, their feet, their nails, their breath, their decaying bodies. Though I discovered that one of Sylvie’s friends, Thierry, the heretic son of a well-known conservative politician, was fed up with it all. He could no longer see beauty in the make-believe. I gave his girlfriend, Linda, a few orgasms between chains and slaps, and she told me about Thierry and his obsession with feces. He eats them, she said. He calls them mes petits bonbons . He waits for me every morning outside the bathroom, reminding me not to flush the toilet. He hates it when things disappear down the drain. He scoops out the feces and I have to clean everything afterwards. C’est horrible!

Meanwhile, my poor naïf professor was charmed by le savoir-vivre, le savoir-faire, le savoir this and that. Peasant! Educated peasant! He must have thought that some of this beloved letter-writer’s glamour would spill over onto him and provide an ingenious cover for his deep desire to hide his misery, his provincial childhood. He was waiting for someone else to give him cover. He was too proud to do it himself, and too conscious of his own revulsion at life’s raw truth. At least I am not. I see people for what they are. I strip them of everything and see their hollowness. I strip them, and they are relieved of the burden of colour and disguise.