He leaned his entire body against a tree whose name he probably didn’t know — but do trees have names? He closed his eyes. His shirt stuck to his body, he was bathed in a cold sweat that made him shiver. He closed his eyes and saw the unwinding of the rest of Time, without him, without the man who had abstracted himself from a world where everything had become foreign. He saw an excerpt from the next day’s paper, a few lines delivering the news about him: Tragedy on Transvaalstraat. Maati S. hung himself last night. Wife in tears, neighbors in shock (“such a quiet, courteous man, etc.”).
No. In the ferocious struggle against the world, never take the side of the world. He took out a tissue from his pocket and wiped his face. Then he picked up his book bag and slowly turned to face the day…to find himself on the exact street where he had lived for years now, with his wife Anna. I am Maati S., engineer, employee of City Hall in Utrecht, rank 11, full time, thirty-eight hours per week. I have just experienced a feeling that drowns me, regularly, at a fixed date. (Maybe it has something to do with the moon.) I call it, lacking a better name, “dislocation.” How can I explain it…The falcon remains deaf, we don’t know why, to the calls of the falconer. It turns and turns and turns in a delirious sky that exacerbates its gyrating. A thousand images of me multiply my terror. Welts, epiphanies, tongues on fire…Everything collapses, there is no more center, in the middle of a night suddenly fallen. There is no more reason. There is no more anything. Who is speaking about what? Who is speaking? Nothing. Nothing. Then, it’s incomprehensible, it’s a sort of new dawn, it’s a small note of the clarinet in the distance, a drum roll, heavy, heady, and the dislocation fades away. These few noises foreshadow a gesture that my wife will make, in a moment, a gesture so banal but containing all the importance I wouldn’t be able to give to the world. It’s curious, the world coagulates, I come up to the surface. I can even start to walk again. It’s enough to put one foot in front of the other. Let’s go! To his great surprise, his left leg obeys. It’s an exhausted automaton that walks, book bag in hand, in the direction of his house. It’s a trembling hand that rises toward the doorbell, a hesitant finger that grazes it. Sounds of footsteps…Who’s there? Is it you, Anna?
“My poor Maati, you look exhausted.”
Here he is seated on the sofa (collapsed, rather). He doesn’t know how he wound up there, he only just this moment rang the doorbell. She leans in while humming, kneels down, carefully removes the slippers martyring his feet. He closes his eyes and lets himself slide down a bit on the sofa. He experiences feelings he cannot define. Relief? Gratitude? Affection? Love? This young woman who carefully removes his slippers, humming…
This, he says to himself, stunned, is what I live for.
BORN NOWHERE
In a café in P*, capital of F*, a young Moroccan approaches me quite civilly (“Are you really What’s-his-name, the gazetteer?”) and vehemently assures me that I must hear his story — he seems to have only one, like most people.
My first instinct is to flee.
But let’s analyze the situation. October. Saturday. Beginning of the evening. The sky low and heavy outside weighs like a lid / and discourages strolls. So, may as well stay in the warmth, in this bar, opposite the church S* G* of P*, to hear what the young man has to say. Light years away from Café de l’Univers (so far, all that…), leagues from other locales, X (that’s his name) recounts:
“A few months ago, in order to obtain my passport to come study in France, I had to give to the appropriate authorities, in Rabat, an official copy of my birth certificate, which I had received myself from the moqaddem of the area for a shiny new ten-dirham bill. Once in my hands, I passed on the aforementioned document, without even glancing at it, to the prefecture — those men, those women, the famous appropriate authorities.”
“Not even glancing at it, you say?”
“Not even.”
“Well, my dear friend, we can already predict the worst catastrophes are in store for you. One must always read everything when it’s an administrative affair. Down to the last word, every comma. And even between the lines.”
“Perhaps. But I didn’t pay any attention to the information in the document because I believed (naively) that I already knew the details.”
A pause.
“After all, I know who I am, right?”
This was said in a defiant tone, the strands of his hair disheveled, his look somber. I, prudently:
“We say that, and then one day…”
He cut me off, vehemently:
“But no! Big mistake! We don’t know who we are, monsieur! We know nothing, monsieur, no matter what Aristotle and all of philosophy have to say about it! When I received my identity card, I saw with stupefaction that after ‘place of birth’ came the response: ‘Khzazna,’ even though I believed I remembered — vaguely — having been born in Rabat.”
“You remember your place of birth? That’s a bit precocious.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I mean to say that I’ve always more or less known that I was born in Rabat. Where did this strange Khzazna come from? It wasn’t a series of typing errors, the letters in ‘Rabat’ and in ‘Khzazna’ aren’t close on the keyboard. I verified — even a monkey typist, even a doddery drunkard, could not end up with ‘Khzazna’ while trying to type ‘Rabat.’ Or else, he would have to be flailing around in every which way…”
He leaned toward me, finger raised.
“I calculated the probability of getting ‘Khzazna’ while trying to type ‘Rabat’: one chance in one hundred thousand billion. On the human level, monsieur, it’s an impossibility!”
“Excellently said.”
“All this was bizarre. At that moment, I couldn’t do anything, for I was preoccupied with my departure for France, which constitutes, as you know, a veritable obstacle course, with its pre-registrations, its registrations, its thousand certificates…But I remained intrigued by this story.”
“Why not just forget about it?”
“Forget about it? It quickly became an obsession! After resolving a thousand problems related to settling in France, I reached a calmer period of my life; and, to be honest, happier. We are, after all, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world?”
“Mmm.”
“One of the most interesting?”
“Hrmblmmmn.”
“But all my friends at the Cité Internationale where I had set down my luggage, all my friends were born in prestigious places, such as Fes or Rabat or Marrakech, or at least interesting places, such as Azrou or Azemmour. But Khzazna? Quès aco? I kept a low profile, buckling under the weight of my shameful secret. And if they were to ask me where I had seen the light of day? Would I be able to lie?”
A waiter materialized above our table, haughty in black and white, and enjoined us to order something (“or else disappear,” his scowl seemed to say). We ordered two coffees and he left, full of disdain. The young man resumed his story.
“Sometimes it was the opposite — I was caught up in a flash of exaltation and saw myself as a duke or at least a marquis, lord of a land perhaps inundated with history, and I was ‘of Khzazna’ as others are ‘of La Rochefoucauld.’ But the exaltation faded fast and I was rotting away once more in the agony of not knowing who I was, having been born nowhere. I needed to be sure! After research worthy of the best explorers, conducted at the Centre Pompidou and at the Bibliothèque Nationale on the rue Richelieu, after exhausting numerous road maps, I succeeded in locating this place where I had been born, at least in the eyes of the law. The pre-war Guide Bleu, unearthed at a secondhand bookstore, was adamant: Khzazna existed indeed!”