And so he kills her, after which he leaves the brothel unobserved. (The bracelets, for what it’s worth, turn out to be paste.) It is a shocking moment, and yet what is perhaps even more shocking is that after it Gohar and the novel calmly go their way for some hundred and fifty pages, as if the murder were almost a natural phenomenon and the murderer a mere instrument of fate.
What is the reader to make of this? Not what you might expect. For one thing, as the Egyptian author and poet Georges Henein has noted,
the idea of guilt … is completely absent from [Cossery’s work]. Gohar is a blend of poverty and poetry. He began by taking his distance, by excluding himself from the usual reasons for living. We believe he is helpless because we see him wandering aimlessly, at the mercy of an ounce of drugs. Yet we must convince ourselves that he belongs to an invulnerable breed that subsists through the grace of innocence and guile combined in one gaze — a gaze that the all powerful adult world is too weak to bear.
Innocence and guile! The same words might describe the response Cossery himself gave when asked why Gohar kills Arnaba. Dismissing the crime as “a blunder, a minor incident,” Cossery explains that he had Gohar commit it “to bring the policeman on the scene, to create a confrontation with a policeman, because the policeman represents a repressive society.” The policeman Nour El Dine, who now enters, is the book’s other major character, and the ensuing confrontation between him and Gohar and Gohar’s friends will take a number of unexpected turns before reaching its surprising, deliberately anticlimactic finale.
Nour El Dine may be a representative of repressive society, but, like Chief of Police Hillali in Cossery’s 1975 novel A Splendid Conspiracy, he is a nuanced figure — not one of those brutish, stupid street cops that Cossery describes as plying their trade “with skillful sadism.” Nour El Dine is in fact one of those whom society represses: a pariah, a guilty homosexual scorned by the world at large and scorned in particular by Samir, the handsome and very straight young man with whom he is hopelessly infatuated. (Nour El Dine’s pitiful and pitiable attempts to seduce Samir are the source of a good deal of humor.) He is also extremely intelligent. Bored by his profession and the petty criminals who surround him, Nour El Dine seeks a higher meaning to life, and his great dream is to come across a crime committed by someone who is his intellectual equal. Now, investigating the crime, he becomes fascinated with Gohar:
it seemed to him that this man was not only what he appeared to be, that is, a failed intellectual reduced to poverty. His ascetic face, his refined speech, the nobility of his attitude — all denoted a sharp and penetrating intelligence. How could such a man have fallen so low on the social ladder? And, especially, why did he give the impression of enjoying it and taking pride in it? Had he by some chance discovered peace in the depths of this extreme deprivation?
Various impediments, some hilariously preposterous, are put in the way of Nour El Dine’s solving the case, but in the end he succeeds. This, however, does not lead to the restoration of order that the reader might anticipate. Proud Beggars is not so much a tale of crime and punishment as it is Nour El Dine’s bildungsroman, in which his way of seeing the world and his life are dramatically transformed:
No doubt Gohar was right. To live like a beggar was to follow the path of wisdom. A life in the primitive state, without constraints. Nour El Dine dreamed of how sweet a beggar’s life would be, free and proud, with nothing to lose. He could finally indulge in his vice without fear or shame. He would even be proud of this vice that had been his worst torment for years. Samir would come back to him. His hatred would vanish automatically when he saw him dispossessed of his emblems of authority, washed of his prejudice and his slimy morality. He would no longer have to fear Samir’s disdain or his sarcasm.
But if Nour El Dine has cast off the shackles of respectability, whether he has it in him to embrace the beggar’s life with proper pride remains uncertain: “A beggar, that was easy — but proud? Where would [Nour El Dine] find pride? There was nothing left in him but an infinite weariness, an immense need for peace — simply for peace.”
The seven novels and single collection of short stories that Cossery wrote at leisure over the course of his long career constitute a tightly unified oeuvre, a sort of Egyptian comédie humaine. “The same idea is in all my books; I shape it differently,” Cossery remarked. “The true writer has limited material at his disposaclass="underline" his vision of the world.” Cossery’s thinking evolved in various ways over the years, but throughout his vision of the world was based on an abhorrence of abusive power and wealth. And he, unlike the existentialists he lived among, always refused to see man’s condition as “absurd.” Like Gohar, Cossery
rebelled with all of his soul against the concept of an absurd universe. Indeed, it was under the cloak of this so-called absurdity of the world that all crimes were perpetrated. The universe was not absurd; it was simply ruled by the most abominable gang of scoundrels that ever soiled the surface of the planet.
Indeed, a revolutionary strain permeates all of Cossery’s work. In his early books the struggle is violent and moralized. The House of Certain Death, from 1944, ends on this note:
The future is full of outcries; the future is full of revolt. How to confine this swelling river that will submerge entire cities? Si Khalil can visualize the house collapsing into dusty ruin. He sees the living arise from among the dead. For they will not all die. They will have to be reckoned with when they rise up, their faces bloody, and their eyes filled with vengeance.
Fifty-five years later, in Cossery’s final novel, The Colors of Infamy, the attitude has become subtler:
This easy obedience to tyrants, which often verged on devotion, always surprised him. He had come to believe that the majority of human beings aspired only to slavery. He had long wondered by what ruse this enormous enterprise of mystification orchestrated by the wealthy had been able to spread and prosper on every continent. Karamallah belonged to that category of true aristocrats who had tossed out like old soiled clothes all the values and all the dogma that these infamous individuals had generated over centuries in order to perpetuate their supremacy. And so his joy in being alive was in no way altered by these stinking dogs’ enduring power on the planet. On the contrary, he found their stupid and criminal acts to be an inexhaustible source of entertainment — so much so that there were times when he had to admit he would miss this mob were they to disappear; he feared the aura of boredom that would envelop humankind once purged of its vermin.
In between, we find our proud beggars, who dream of revolution but love life too much to bother rising up (El Kordi); who rebel by “non-cooperation” and a refusal to “collaborate with this immense charade” imposed by the powerful (Gohar); and the poets of the world, who resist the allure of money and fame, contenting themselves with friendship, drugs, and the beautiful language of the people (Yeghen).
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
Growing up in a well-to-do Cairene family, Cossery was educated at the Lycée Français and began reading and writing in French at a very young age. The voice of the narrator in all his work is unique, containing a strong, idiosyncratic dose of hyperbole and comic simile, but his French prose is not unidiomatic. As has often been pointed out, the dialogues, however, are on the whole supposed to imitate “literal” translations from the Arabic. They are peppered with “By Allah,” “Peace be with you,” and “This is indeed a day of honey!” or phrases such as the lovely “in its mother’s eyes a monkey has the grace of a gazelle” found in Proud Beggars.