Tahar Ben Jelloun - Leaving Tangier

Kenza arrives alone. She is radiant, dressed all in white, her hair hanging loose, and she speaks to no one, but she seems happy and at ease. Time has done its work; spring has left a little of its pollen-dust behind. Kenza’s life has been shaken, and some memories have fallen free like fruit from a tree. Some good ones, some bad. She has not had the strength to sort through them. There will be time enough to bring order to all that. She is no longer anxious and feels relieved, as light as on the day of her first period, when she ran through the streets as if flying like a swallow. This morning she had that same feeling. It was so good: changing bodies, putting some distance between herself and the world with its misfortunes, moving beyond that great sorrow and not choking with shame in her sleep. Kenza calmly boards the ship; a sailor shows her to a pleasant cabin. This cabin has a view of the sea, he tells her, and the dolphins that escort us — they’re intelligent, they talk among themselves and we understand them. They’ll come greet you, but don’t worry if sharks sometimes drive them away and swim along with us for a while. Rest now; look, here’s a thermos of tea, and some cookies. Kenza falls swiftly and serenely asleep, pleased to be going home again. Bending over her, Toutia gently strokes her cold face. Then she kisses her forehead and tucks the covers in around her shoulders.

Soumaya, the beauty, the woman who believed everything men told her, who gave herself to them freely, Soumaya, lost and found again, comes aboard, covered from head to toe. No one dares speak to her. She wears the white haik of the peasant women of the Rif, hiding her body from which the last few years have stripped all charms. She is her own victim, and answering the call, she, too, has joined the ship. Soumaya has not become a Muslim sister; if she remains veiled it’s to conceal her face: her right cheek is scarred, and she is missing a few teeth. When asked she says she had an accident. ‘Yes, an awful crash on the road between Toledo and Madrid, he was driving like a madman, he’d been drinking, an oncoming truck ploughed right into us and that’s all I remember; later when I came to, I looked in the mirror and screamed. Disfigured… The insurance company paid me some money and the doctor said, ‘Go, go back home, there’s a boat waiting for you in Tarifa, you’ll see, you won’t be the only one going aboard: it’s a magic ship, and on it life will seem beautiful to you, the sun will always shine for you, so go, my weary beauty.’ I set out enveloped in my grandmother’s haik; it was to be her shroud, but when she died in Mecca I inherited it: Egyptian cotton, very soft, very strong, and no one has noticed me, I can disappear into this shroud, it was perfect for crossing the country without being bothered or questioned by the police, so I blessed my grandmother for having the good sense to die in Mecca. They told me she died smothered in the crush of the crowd, in the place where they stone the devil;* it seems that often happens, people lose control, trampling the weak and elderly … but they also say that dying over there sends you straight to paradise! Me, I don’t want to die, I’m still young, I want to start a family, have children and tell them stories…’

When Flaubert arrives dripping with perspiration, no one pays any attention to him. He’s been running, convinced he was going to miss the boat. Tall, slender, his eyes shining, he can’t stand still, and talks loudly. ‘The day I found out the return boat was waiting in Tarifa, I dropped everything and hit the road. Took a good week to get here. I had to run, lost a few pounds, but I feel fine. So, where are we going? Why doesn’t anyone answer?’ He looks for a familiar face. Everyone is off in a private world. There’s nothing for him to do but follow their example. Flaubert has an idea, though: ‘What if this ship were just a fiction, a novel cast upon the waters, a book in the form of a bottle tossed into the sea by all those weeping mothers so sick of waiting? If I’m right, now I finally understand why my parents named me Flaubert. So, all I have to do is enter the novel. But how does one become a fictional character? What’s the way to slip between the pages and settle comfortably into the most beautiful chapter in a story of love and war? Madame Bovary — there’s no more room for me, it’s full up, and anyway there’s no black guy in that story… Where can I find a hideout, a cushy spot? There’s always Gone with the Wind , but who’d want to be in that? If I could only find it, this novel where I could be a character, I wouldn’t need to work anymore: the novelist would take charge of me, give me a role, fit me into the story, make me live, love, yell, and die in the end because he wouldn’t know how else to wind up the story. But I don’t want to die, not even as a paper character; I don’t want to burn or get pulped, that happens a lot, when books that haven’t found their readers get sent to a paper factory or shredded into papier-mâché to make cardboard boxes. Can you imagine! My character, multiplied in thousands of copies only to be thrown into a grinding machine that squishes my head over here, my balls over there, now it’s the feet, in short — it takes a mere few minutes to subdivide me into millions of tiny paper scraps: I wind up as confetti! Or writing paper or a movie poster or even toilet tissue. No, forget it, better I should look for an epic novel that’s still in the works, and sneak in among the main characters — as a museum guard, for example — and watch the amorous goings-on between the heroine and her lover, a diplomat hounded by his wife who’s two-timing him with the head of the diplomatic corps… What if I asked that English woman who wrote the book everyone’s reading now, it’s about a magical character — that guy, no question, his book won’t end up in the shredder! That novel would suit me; problem is, it’s already written, so how could there be a new version for me to appear in? Shouldn’t I start by reading it? Someone on this boat must have it, millions of copies were sold, so I’m sure the rats have one in their nests for the hard times of winter, definitely — rats stock up on summer novels for those long cold nights. The only difference from us is, rats don’t read, they nibble the paper to get all those vitamins in the ink. That’s what my cousin Émilzola, a librarian in Douala, told me one day. Now that I think about it, becoming a character in a novel is the best thing that could happen to me. My cousins and so forth in Nde won’t believe me, they’ll think the horrors of exile have driven me round the bend. I can just see them chuckling. ‘Flaubert? Ho yes! He escaped! Right out of this world! Found fictional work in a work of fiction! He prances around in books, sleeps in pages perfumed women open daintily to read. You get it? All day he sleeps in the purse of some fabulous woman, follows her everywhere, even when she’s taking a bath: she reads him, he ogles her, licking his lips, while here we are still wondering what to do about this inheritance, since there’s still the matter of the tontine… What a guy, that Flaubert — he found a way to avoid dealing with reality, yes, real reality, the kind that sticks to us like glue, and hurts. Him, he’s an old fox, got it made, sitting pretty on a library shelf waiting for some hand to reach for him, open him, flip through him, then put him right back because there’s no sex, nothing erotic in the novel, just politics that won’t interest hardly anybody, leastways that’s what we heard …”

And now it’s Flaubert’s turn to find himself a small space, next to the lemon tree where, lulled by its subtle scent, he falls asleep like a child. The lemon blossoms take only a few moments to waft him on their perfume all the way to the terraces of Fès, to the old city where women spread the aromatic flowers of citrus and jasmine trees out to dry on big white sheets, after which the blooms are steamed to extract the essential oils that make the finest perfumes.