: V:
the phonograph was playing a dance tune.
That evening, Salma felt strangely indifferent to the mood of the clandestine orgy pervading her living room. Wearing a green silk dress, her throat and arms laden with jewelry, her face glum beneath her makeup, she sat
on the edge of the sofa staring at the couples swaying in front of her who were holding one another in voluptuous embraces disguised as dance moves. The music frustrated her and filled her with a kind of painful nostalgia for a bygone era. Mostly she was annoyed by the hysterical laughter and childish behavior of the two girls Imtaz had brought with him and who, with immoderate intensity in their frail innocence, were rushing headlong into debauchery. As usual, they were middle-school girls who had been recruited as they were leaving their school grounds, and who had been so captivated by Imtaz’s fame and glory that they had forgotten any and all self-restraint. Following the former idol’s insidious advice, they had slipped out of their parents’ homes in the hope of spending a night in amusements totally inappropriate to their age — a night that, in their imaginations, they anticipated as rich in depravity of all kinds. More than anything they were afraid of not being able to rise to the occasion, and in their minds kept stretching the boundaries of indecency acceptable in such circumstances. After a few drinks they had become completely shameless. Salma, though she did not admit it to herself, resented them with the hatred of the bitter female: almost twenty-three, she already considered herself an old maid. All the men who came to her home to amuse themselves held her in the kind of polite regard normally reserved for a madam in a brothel.
These men had absolutely no intention of courting her, or even of feeling sorry for her. Their friendship was based unquestionably on an unfailing attachment to her, and yet they remained impervious to her inner turmoil — as they in fact were to all manifestations of turmoil in the world — as if for them life consisted mainly of the pleasures miraculously retrieved from the nauseating swamp of this city. She couldn’t hold it against them; she was even grateful they had chosen her house as the den of their secret orgies. Her dishonor was known throughout the city, and so no scandal was great enough to further harm her reputation. At bottom, she was glad of their presence, instinctively appreciating the sarcastic spirit that animated their slightest words and their excessive contempt for all the institutions and conventions established by men. At times they gave her the impression of having been sent by some extraterrestrial power to record the immeasurable stupidity and vileness of the creatures on this planet.
The young men organized these licentious gatherings at her home with the meticulous resolve of strategists plotting the fall of an empire. They not only diverted her from her sad mood; they also — chiefly — gave her the wild satisfaction of taking her revenge against the man she abhorred. For Chawki, that miscreant who in the past had taken advantage of her virginal soul, almost always attended in his capacity as their slimy patron of concupiscence and arrogance. She could therefore ridicule him at her leisure, lashing out at him with scathing, sarcastic remarks in front of vigilant witnesses wise to all his vices. It was for these intoxicating moments that she dug herself deeper into the ditch where she had fallen and refused to forget the past; she wanted to forever remain a living remorse in the eyes of the infamous man who had seduced her with his promises and dishonored her by abandoning her. He would never be rid of her. She would stay in this city forever as a woman marked by shame, and this shame would be reflected on Chawki and his descendants until the end of time. This was her only consolation.
After her misadventure with Chawki, there had been other men who had claimed to be in love with her and had offered to marry her, but she had always fiercely refused them. Nothing was to disrupt her in her pursuit of revenge. Until now she had followed this line, without asking anything from fate other than to thwart her seducer. No doubt she would have continued along this path if Medhat — surely inspired by some evil genie — had not one day brought under her roof a young man named Samaraï, a veterinary student, who had suddenly discovered a reckless and immense passion for Salma that made one think that, besides his mother, he had never seen a woman in his life. That brute was now in Salma’s living room, sprawled out in an armchair and, holding a glass of whisky tightly in his hand, drinking excessively like someone getting drunk in preparation for committing a desperate act.
The story of this Samaraï was simply outrageous. A veterinary student in the capital, he had only come to this town to claim a small inheritance an old aunt had left him. He had got his money — approximately a thousand pounds — and was about to leave when, realizing he still had plenty of time to catch his train, he went to sit at a café near the station. Fate was such that, at this same café at the neighboring table, Medhat was in the process of figuring out what hope he could reasonably have regarding the future of humanity. This hope was so paltry — not to say nonexistent — that he looked around him so as to be even more convinced of the fact. No doubt this young tourist’s air of importance (all the tourists Medhat saw had this same expression of importance, as if taking the train bestowed on them a certificate of heroism) inspired him with the idea of leading him astray. So he began talking to the young student and, after an hour of eminently instructive conversation, he had managed to dissuade him from leaving until he, Medhat, had initiated him into the fantastic pleasures this city concealed. Samaraï—young, shy, not very sociable, and entirely caught up in his studies — had been unable to resist his tablemate’s seductive words. A certain idea of the world, a strange simplicity, had just been revealed to him and he was stunned by it, for nothing had prepared him for such a realization. Without leaving him too much time to think, Medhat grabbed the young man’s suitcase and dragged him toward the exploration of the promised delights. Samaraï followed effortlessly; it seemed that he had at last found the ideal brother of whom he had been dreaming since childhood. Medhat’s pernicious philosophy and his implacable sense of humor had erased in one fell swoop the memory of all those years he’d spent studying for his degree. The more he listened to his companion, the more life seemed to be essentially pointless and, at the same time, extremely interesting. A skilled guide, Medhat took him to various places, making him notice all the oddly magnificent details that were set in the surrounding rot and that only the arrogance of a blind man would refuse to see. Samaraï was walking on air; he did not understand by what magic this repulsive town from which he had been in a hurry to escape had suddenly assumed the appearance of a city with many extraordinary and delightful facets. He simply nodded his head, giving up on illuminating such enigmas for fear of breaking the spell. Every now and then he would stop to hug Medhat and kiss him, calling him his savior and his brother. They were tired and slightly drunk when, late one night, they arrived at Salma’s.
It was the first time Samaraï had entered the den of a courtesan, and the experience was lethal. The perfumed and highly erotic intimacy he discovered inside the home of this richly kept harlot so intensely awoke the virility that had been slumbering for so long, that he fell in love with the young woman like a brute, that is, like a primeval man barely emerged from his native forest, and he no longer wanted to leave the place unless he were kicked out by the police. At first Salma was flattered and amused by this crude passion and she allowed him to move in with her, thinking that the young man’s ardor would last only as long as he stayed in the city; but she quickly regretted her generosity when she realized that this ardor, rather than diminishing, was instead on its way to becoming eternal. In sum, this impudent veterinarian turned out to belong to that sect of men who instantly start thinking about marriage the moment they have slept with a woman, whether she be one-eyed, hunch-backed, or paralytic. From noon to night he hounded her with his passion, begging her to follow him to the capital where his studies were waiting for him and where he swore he would marry her. Salma responded to his constant exhortations with insults, calling him a poor beggar unable to feed even a bastard dog, and wound up spitting in his face, thinking that by treating him so offensively she would make him sick of her and he would go back to his stinking capital. And indeed her actions would have put off a man of some dignity, but nothing seemed to offend the fundamentally easy-going nature of this wild man; it was as if Salma’s rudeness merely strengthened his fantasies of matrimony. The situation had become intolerable for the young woman because, despite the affection she was beginning to have for her lover (his stubbornness and his coarse meddling in her private life had in the end made her vulnerable to his spirited professions of love), she did not want to abandon everything she had gained through her dishonor to face the unknown and its potential new setbacks. Yes, she was dishonored, but the sumptuous apartment and substantial monthly allowance Chawki gave her were major assets for gaining respect in the neighborhood. In truth, the myth of the fallen woman that she continued to keep alive only increased her respectability by injecting a whiff of tragic fatality into her situation, without which she would have been no more than a vulgar prostitute in the eyes of her neighbors. Samaraï, who was too unsophisticated to suspect his mistress of such dark ethical fraud, interpreted her reticence to accept his marriage proposal as monstrous harassment and, to console himself, had begun to drink. This diversion would have been inconsequential if alcohol (to which he was not accustomed) had not altered the usual sweetness of his nature and caused him to do things that horrified the people around him. He was on the verge of becoming a hateful character.