2023-10-02 09:28:30
I do not know if the novel has the right to invade the details of the city, but this is what happened in the second half of the year 2000. I was cowering on a chair in one of the Hamra cafes, when the child Oscar, the hero of the novel “The Tin Drum” by Günter Grass, entered.The rain drizzle was etching the outside glass of the café like tears, indicating the future of the street, and indeed the future of the entire city. I never thought that I would meet Oscar one day. He invaded the café with his tin drum, and the sound of beating on the drum was deafening… and whoever reads “The Tin Drum” will understand the background of this infernal hammering. Oscar approached me quickly, then stopped knocking and said: I admit that I am a resident of a mental institution. I said to Oscar: Me too, then I took a quick look at the people in the café, on the street, and in the homes, and added: We are all inmates of a huge mental institution.
Oscar returned to the street, and Charles Bukowski looked at me from another side of the café and began cursing and insulting me because of the noise that Oscar had caused. I tried to calm the American novelist down, but the intoxication that defined his features prevented any possibility of understanding, and the obscenity emanating from his tongue was gathering momentum around. Bukowski criticized Gunther Grass, the character of Oscar, as the German novelist expressed it in his famous novel. Then he gathered his tongue and said, addressing no one: The author of “The Tin Drum” should have realized from the beginning that contemporary society has generated its own organisms, and they are organisms that devour each other. …We are, the author of the novel “Women” added, facing a struggle to the death inside a sewer, a phrase he took from “women.” All this tinny noise has no meaning, Bukowski said. Let us die without noise, he said, so that the obscenities would come back and slip from his tongue steadily.
I do not hide that I felt a feeling of embarrassment because of the frenzy of insults that Bukowski uttered, but there was something that alleviated the severity of this embarrassment: a sentence he addressed to a man whose features betrayed suppressed wisdom. Let him unleash his obscenities, Mikhail Bakhtin told me from his chair at the far end of the café: obscene words contribute to creating an atmosphere of freedom and a comic appearance to the world. I shook my head in exchange for Bakhtin, who raised his enormous book on Rabelais to my face, pointing out that the phrase he had recited appeared in this book.
Each of us returned to the bottom of our cup, diving into the frozen dregs at the bottom of life, except for the boy Oscar, who was repeating in a low, whispery voice that he was a resident of a mental institution.
I did not know whether I wanted to write down these events, as I had forgotten about the pen that was between my fingers, but the sudden entry of Roland Barthes into the café alerted me to the reckless words that were scattered on the paper in front of me. I felt very ashamed at the sudden presence of the French philosopher, and I think my features had abandoned my face, but Barthes strengthened my resolve and pulled me out of my shyness. He read to me a text from his book “The Pleasure of the Text” in order to strengthen me. “I myself was a public place, a popular market, through which words, expressions, and remnants of formulas passed me by…” I was very happy with Barthes’s words and I let the expressions return to occupy my face with pleasure. There was a man who was sitting in a dark side of the café, for reasons that I will not mention out of caution. He turned to me with a hopeful look, noticing the bright expression on my face as a result of Bart’s presence, and thus boldly writing down the words. “In the manner of optimists, treat the present as if it were a formless substance,” Amos Oz said, and his book “Hannah and Michael” or “Michael and Anna” quickly buzzed in my head… I no longer remember, but the above phrase appeared in this book.
The tears of the city pouring over the glass of the café were beginning to fade, and the movement of people in the street indicated extreme boredom, and some of them looked like drunkards or someone who had taken an overdose of heroin in their walking. I don’t know how William Burroughs came to enter my mind and read my words about heroin, even before I wrote them down. He dragged himself across my table with his usual laziness, stroked the boy Oscar’s head with his palm, glanced at Bukowski, then read to me a phrase from his novel “The Addict”: “Becoming an addict means that you do not have strong urges in any other direction.” Burroughs stuck his mouth into my ear socket and read the phrase. I returned my gaze to the people on the sidewalks and the street, and I saw them as beings sulking in boredom and dying. The matter weakened my resolve to the point of crying, and I started crying, me, Bukowski, Oscar, Bakhtin, Oz, and Burroughs, while Roland Barthes recorded the sound of our crying. Suddenly I saw me writing on paper from among my tears: The story of my life does not exist, it is a story that does not exist. I tried hard to remember the name of the book that contained this phrase, only to be surprised when everyone’s eyes turned to a table near the door where Marguerite Duras was sitting in complete silence. Well, Duras’s phrase appears in her book, “The Lover.”
Indeed, I suddenly became estranged from every origin, from every root, from every past, recent or distant, and because of this matter I almost used a phrase from “The Boredom of Paris” by Baudelaire, but I changed the matter for fear that Baudelaire would be embodied here… This street The sound of thunder was not yet ready to shake the place, and like politeness it permeated every joint of the city. Literature may be thunder, it may be lightning, it may be a rain shower, and it may be other things. I slowly sipped the coffee while looking at others, and I did not know that exchanging close looks was so enjoyable, as stated in “The Mountain of God” by Ari De Luca, who was looking at people’s shoes from his place in the middle of the café like a natural cobbler. You have to treat ideas like you treat shoes, De Luca said as he hustled a woman into passing at the entrance to the café. As soon as I looked at the face of the woman who had just entered, I began to struggle to regulate my heartbeat… I adore this woman. Since I met her in “The Big Notebook” and then in “Al-Burhan,” I fell in love with her. We used to meet in secret from the world, meeting each other sometimes in sleep dreams and sometimes in daydreams. As usual, she was holding a cigarette in front of her beautiful face. None of the attendees greeted me, but I was sure that she secretly kissed me obscenely. It was real to the point of living flesh, the flesh that was desired at all times. She is the one who taught me that what is written gradually replaces the truth, and at that moment she led me eagerly to embrace her book “Illiteracy,” which contains this sentence. The surprise stopped me from saying anything, as Agota Christoph approached me and handed me the book from the inside of her purse, after passing it in front of my face with a passion of intense kisses… Oh this wonderful city!
The world quickly ceased to be a moving graveyard, as the wonderful Moroccan Mohamed Zafzaf says in “The Fox That Appears and Disappears,” and he was drinking mint tea at the table next to mine. He whispered in my ear, with a smile on his face: It’s okay, Fawzi, to be like the fox who never stops appearing and disappearing.
I am the fox of the café and literature, the fox of the street, the fox of the city over which tears flow. All of these crowded into my mind, and I was lost in my thoughts and my eyebrows were furrowed with doubt. where am I?! Am I above Beirut? On the sidelines? Am I above or below Beirut? I am underneath it… Beirut from underneath is beautiful.
The cunning fox of Zafzaf returned to whisper to me like a clever devil, while my eyes told me the story of the city from inside the café. Perhaps the city is “the story of the eye,” but from a perspective other than that conveyed by Georges Bataille in his famous story of the eye.
A flock of pigeons suddenly appeared in the sky of the street, and I was happy to watch them from behind the glass of the café. The rain had been trapped in the plate of the sky and the rays of the sun were peeking out like innocent thieves. “Dreams of dreams” came to me about the same as those in Antonio Tabucchi’s book, which was the result of a semi-secret conversation with Fernando Pessoa, standing, near the bar that separates the café workers from its visitors. Their words were very hoarse, like the bellies of dark nights.
The city faded from the glow of an innocent sun that rose to the sky, and I do not know if literature has the right to invade the city… I began repeating to myself this phrase that attacked me with passion: I do not know if literature has the right to invade the city.
Before he was about to leave the place, having finished his conversation with Tabuki, Pessoa addressed me by saying: Literature is the greatest proof that life as it is is not enough.
It is not usual for Pepsoa to raise the cost with anyone. I felt honored and proud because he informed me of this fact. My friends started leaving the café, one by one, like ghosts fading with every step. The café was empty of everyone except me. I dropped the pen from my fingers and my being was filled with a lightness I had never experienced before. I closed my eyes from everything and then headed to my beautiful city with an eternal kiss.
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