Teymour waited calmly to see how the conversation would evolve. But the conversation was slow in picking up again.
The waiter brought the coffee and Rezk began to drink it in tiny sips, conscious of the gaze of the two men fastened on him. His face, with its delicate features slightly tensed as if he were suffering from some buried pain, was occasionally lit by a pale smile that invited sympathy. He seemed sincerely aggrieved by Medhat’s suspicions regarding his good feelings for him.
“My friend Teymour,” declared Medhat, “was away from our city for a long time. He was pursuing endless studies abroad. He’s an immensely educated man.”
“Pursuing studies,” said Rezk in a dreamy tone, as if these grandiloquent words had struck a chord in him. “How marvelous! I am delighted you have returned among us.”
“The honor is all mine,” answered Teymour in a steady voice, without committing himself.
“You’ll see him often now,” Medhat said to the young man. “He won’t be leaving us again. You were complaining about the lack of cultured men in our city; well, now you’ve got what you wanted. You’ll be able to converse as much as you like with a superior mind.”
“I’d never dare to bother him,” said Rezk.
“You would not be bothering him,” Medhat asserted. “Right, Teymour?”
“Not in the least,” Teymour replied. “On the contrary, I’d be thrilled.”
“It would be a signal favor for me,” said Rezk. “In truth, I love to read. I suppose you must have brought back a pile of books by foreign writers?”
“Yes, a few,” said Teymour. “I’d be happy to lend you some if you’d find it useful.”
“Oh, I can’t thank you enough! I am your humble servant. Here foreign books are like manna from heaven!”
“You see,” said Medhat. “By insisting you keep us company, I only had your happiness in mind. Because I, Rezk, my brother, I love you.”
Rezk had finished his coffee and was attempting to put an end to the dealings with his companions by means of silences, nods, and distraught glances toward the square. He was waiting for the moment to withdraw in a way that wouldn’t seem rude.
Medhat noticed he was ill at ease and came to his rescue.
“You can go now if you want,” he said, smiling.
Rezk sprang out of his chair like a robot unfolding its legs.
“Thank you for the coffee. I am very honored to have met you,” he said looking at Teymour intensely, as if he wanted to store his image on his retina forever.
As soon as Rezk had left, Teymour asked:
“What on earth was that? Where’d he come from?”
“He’s a police informant,” replied Medhat with sublime indifference.
: III:
whenever he looked back on the episode, Imtaz couldn’t help reliving all the ghastliness of that moment when, clasping his co-star in a fiery embrace, he had realized his error. He had stood there, stunned and filled with absurd terror as he heard the audience shouting out sarcastic remarks, while his partner — the actress he was supposed to have taken in his arms — emitted the shrieks of a woman dishonored before collapsing, unconscious, in an armchair. Then the curtain came down, the catcalls and the laughter grew fainter, and Imtaz tried to understand how the catastrophe could have occurred. Over the course of some hundred performances, he had played this scene, in which he entered a living room where his fiancée and her brother were waiting for him, by using as reference points the spots where the other actors usually stood on the stage. Despite his extreme near-sightedness, he was able to distinguish the characters he had to deal with well enough not to make any critical mistakes. At first he thought his partners had exchanged places during the scene that preceded his entrance, and that his blunder had arisen from this switch. But such was not the case. Nothing of the kind had occurred; it was almost as if he had deliberately chosen to head in the wrong direction. This realization led him to seek a psychological explanation for his behavior. Was it some unconscious drive that had sent him rushing toward his fiancée’s brother? It seemed like the eruption of some long-repressed act — he despised the actress who played opposite him — she was a stupid, vulgar woman of about forty with sagging flesh who had, for a small fortune, been promoted to the ranks of celebrity by a wealthy merchant. Imtaz had a very hard time hiding his disgust whenever he acted with her. Each time he had to take her in his arms, she would latch on to him, hungrily seeking his mouth like a vampire thirsting for blood. It was therefore highly plausible that he had attempted to escape her adipose hugs and kisses by moving unconsciously toward her partner, a shy young man who represented absolutely no threat to him. This explanation restored Imtaz’s confidence in his eyesight as well as in his sense of direction.
He was not, however, alone in studying the enigma of his strange behavior. The members of the audience who had been witness to his unfortunate embrace did not remain passive; they were quick to peddle all sorts of conflicting rumors regarding his morals and his origins. Some of them considered him a very reasonable man and praised him to the skies: these were the capital’s confirmed homosexuals. They wrote him a long letter congratulating him for having finally made such a spectacular choice. The scandal died down rather quickly, but doubt lingered in people’s minds. Imtaz’s career as an actor was seriously compromised. Humiliated by this tragic mishap, he was forced to withdraw from the public eye: he no longer felt up to appearing on stage opposite actors who were becoming more and more invisible to him. One more gaffe like that, and he would be stoned to death. He would be cornered into revealing a secret no one knew, not even his closest friends.
His myopia, growing worse each year, was the bane of his acting career because Imtaz, not wanting to disappoint all those women who admired his tremendous good looks, refused to wear glasses. Wearing glasses on stage seemed unbefitting given the virile, womanizing roles that ordinarily fell to him. He did not even wear them in town, and so people took him to be haughty and distant, an attitude completely foreign to his nature. And indeed, his shortsightedness gave his gaze the impenetrable and secretive air that lay at the very heart of his legend. All his power over crowds — and especially over women — he owed to the perpetual dim surroundings in which he moved: human beings, with their indistinct outlines, seemed to have absolutely no influence over his fate. His indifference to the attentions of his enthusiastic public, to feminine smiles and glances — for the simple reason that he could not see them — made him appear to be a charismatic, disdainful idol convinced of his own flawlessness. Imtaz knew that his fame depended entirely on this imposture and he could not bring himself to destroy the myth he embodied by revealing his infirmity to the world. He was willing to do anything save spoil his beautiful face by donning a pair of ridiculous glasses. Rather than going around wearing such barbaric accoutrements — which would have explained the true meaning of his misstep on stage — he had preferred to disappear from view, and had chosen his home town as his place of refuge. He owned a modest apartment there; it had belonged to his parents, both of whom were now dead, and he had always held on to it because it was tied to memories of his childhood. He intended to wait there until the scandal was completely forgotten.