Ziziphus Spina-christi
I bit the useless pillow and threw it away at 5:45 a.m. I washed my face and looked far behind my dim complexion in the mirror and since I hate to carry bags, I wore almost everything I had, sheltering myself inside three overcoats, the deep pockets of which were stuffed with all kinds of superfluous necessities: two pounds of chewing tobacco, a wooden toothbrush, changes of underwear, nail clippers, and a couple of Mp3 players. I pushed a novel under one of my sleeves: Diary of a Country Priest. I thought it was suitable for the journey: a pale priest moping in the cover, with a churchyard and a steeple crushed by a red sky behind him.
I was the first one to reach the taxi and got immediately into the front seat, the only decent one besides that of the driver. God help the poor bastards stuck in the back, for they will drink each other’s breath and scratch their balls with embarrassing discreetness for a very long time. “How far is the district of N.?” I asked the sleepy driver. He gave me a foul answer and stepped out of the car and started shouting other ugly sounds in the air. I assumed they were names of places along the way. They touched some very old bells. As he repeated the sounds in quick succession, they began to form a forgotten melody, they detached themselves slowly from each other, expelling an ancient image. My soul was suddenly spotted like the trunk of a eucalyptus tree.
The other passengers were not long to arrive, and they were all disappointed to find that the front seat has already been taken. An elderly man tried to bribe me with his blessings; another one nearly broke my window with his crutch. I stuck the earbuds so deep that Richter raked my brains with Schumann’s Bunte Blätter and held the book against my face for half an hour, until the sun revealed the reversed cross and sentences. I closed my eyes for a moment when a thick perfume announced itself in the air. I looked up and a veiled creature came to me in a cloud of saffron and frankincense, smothering the Papillons that I was foolishly trying to chase in my dreams. The men in the back were eagerly rearranging themselves to make a seat for the woman in their midst. Honest and unpretentious folk prefer the Venus of Willendorf to the one from Milos. They would rather be rolled again in warm clay than lay in marble. I knew they would resent me for not letting the mass of perspiring meat kindle their dreams for many nights to come and gave her my seat just to spite them.
The dreamer who has never been trapped in a shared taxi before must have neglected a great opportunity to study the human shapes and to suffer by their proximity. Despite its light suggestion of romantic possibilities, the bus is impersonal. Everyone inside becomes his seat eventually, the only human thing left in them is resentment as they lean their rattling heads against the windows and think about the happy mortals who are holding their own steering wheels, alone and closer to the wind. The train, on the other hand, travels an abstract distance, from one station to the next it subtracts a strict line. The traveler can eat and sleep and smoke and relieve himself. He can walk and engage with other people, but he lives the duration of his voyage in a stagnant communist allegory. He doesn’t travel at all. When he steps out and sees the hollow rails, no matter how painful the journey is, the neck and legs are stiffened by invisible shackles, the mind is distant and the pain unrewarding.
It has been a long time since I rode in one of these vessels. They keep buzzing under the yellow sun, and they travel through an ever-increasing clarity. Fortunately, when hunched over in the trunk, one can only see the back of people’s heads, and if he’s inspired enough, he can still operate a guillotine with his nails after he runs out of music to entertain the long journey. I commanded my disgust and unplugged my ears. I removed my three overcoats and sank my head against the straw bags of the other passengers. My eyes kept measuring the thickness of the glass, fantasizing all the way about the sudden death that each heavy truck can offer. A diaper or an uncorked bottle was also very welcome as my bladder was more ready to explode than that of a kid before his first school fight. I sculpted two small pyramids of tobacco and stuck them between my disjointed molars. The juice loosened my memory but my teeth clenched with the desire to urinate immediately in the world’s biggest dam, and I had to fix myself in the present and understand why I was sitting in a stinking yellow car amid those strange people, masticating a substance that tasted like wet socks. Why go back to that ugly village by the desert, while I could live far away in a shaded corner of the world? Perhaps I was tired of playing the ethnologist or the zoologist wherever I went. It is time to admit that I’m just another soup seeker. These people are almost primitive in the constancy of their practices. They are thickly hided and they mate like elephants. If I could only learn to live with them, I’d be able to expand my narrow soul into the Upper-Paleolithic. I would embrace humanity in all its terrifying vastness.
The men were talking all at once. Some scandal or other has happened in the village, and all I could get from their conversation: a string of guttural sounds above a nasal stream that ebbed and flowed with emotional intensity, demonstrated with a complete set of corporeal convulsions, where the trajectory of a single spit and the level of froth may convey different meanings; all I could understand is that the mayor has been caught with his pants down and leaning against his desk, or something similar. Maybe the urine was clouding my judgment. It would be running from my nose if I didn’t smother my bladder with the book.
The priest’s passion is my dream. He was disappearing in misty lands under a very dark sky, nibbling a biscuit soaked in brandy, wearing a cross and cassock over his damp and heavy heart, preaching under deepening naves, sneaking around ancient manorial houses, paddling in the middle of penitent cleavages and sin-torn skirts. The man was drowning in the dewiest depression.
The sun seemed to be stuck forever on the liver of the firmament. The taxi stopped next to a small cube of concrete which looked as clumsy and absurdly permanent as the houses made with modelling clay by kids in kindergarten, where they roll the colored bars together, mixing them into a definitive gray lump. A very old woman inside served tea and coffee and hard-boiled eggs. I ran toward the bathroom in the back but when I saw the ceramic hole splashed with generations of crap, I could not force myself to wash them down with the intensity of my urine. I just stood there, dangling down with my hands against the wall. Then I leaned my head on the spot where it was written in awkward arabesques that cleanliness is next to godliness and I wept. “Let me dip my head in the hole,” I prayed to the lingering spirit of defecation. I owed it to humanity. I had to go as far as a few inches to prove that I really belonged. Thou shalt cover thy head in thy brethren’s shit, that is the supreme commandment! Someone knocked at the door and I escaped. I walked slowly back to the car, almost crawling. I reopened the book and crouched between the words to forget the pain in my stomach and the humiliation of that sudden burst of pathos. I had to summon the past and grasp its revolving days like beads between the fingers of a blind penitent.
After studying the shapes of boredom for half of my life and spending the other half training to be a person with definite proportions in society, forcing my indifferent hands into the lives of other people, so that the latter period served only to justify the abstract loathsomeness of the former. After all this time, and the intellectual hunchback, and the hemorrhoids, and the thick spectacles, and the rotten heart, I was going to work in the only place where I have done a real wrong to somebody. It was not the evil nature of the act that troubled me as much as the fact that it was done, albeit at the very surface of things. All my life I have strayed far from acting positively and learned to shrink while carried away by life, misplaced like a spiritual octopus in a sewer. I shudder at the thought of bringing the slightest difference to the world, working myself to retro-ejaculate and touching those I loved with the furthest tip of myself when they became desperate enough to grab me with their inquisitive flesh probing my very heart in suspicion of its beating. I can honestly say that I have never voluntarily changed the course of an event, and I would be proud of it, except for the act of external cruelty that will always mark the integrity of my militant apathy if I don’t erase it.
The village may grow in the map between two rugged hills, or wind in reality through the bed of a fossilized valley, or even rise in the imagination of the natives like a spiral towards the double sepulcher of their ancestor, but it remains fairly stamped in my mind as a glorious entrance. My grandfather bought a patch of bare land not very far from the village. He worked on it for some years before the pomegranate trees were gnashed to the sap and buried by successive swarms of locusts and the ever-crouching desert. It was the most ridiculous experience of living as a gentleman farmer. I think that he had a vague project of building his own Yasnaya Polyana. He bred his wife to be simple and yielding, he had the unmistakable demeanor of intellectual sinners, he tried to walk barefoot again, for they have known in his early days how to scorn his native sands and fields of thorns, and he preached, silently, through his soiled belt but he also wrote weak prose, studied in East Germany and hated humanity with all his heart.
While the farm was still struggling, I spent a part of the summer holidays there with my cousins. During my eighth winter, I fell sick, the doctor recommended that I should be sent away from the city to breath the dry air of the pre-desert hills. The happiness of being out of school for two whole weeks in the middle of the term was so overbearing that it still outlines everything that happened then in nostalgic haze.
I remember the kid who, as soon as his parents drove back, snatched himself from his tight city uniform, disheveled his hair, and ran in the wilderness until he became scaled like a lizard. The next day, early in the morning, the sound of his grandmother’s humming prayers permeated his dreams and made the sleep sweeter. She pronounced his name with each serrated sound spread like a coarse sheet around him. When he felt the blanket being pulled away, he retreated instantly under the pillow and remained stiff until his body sucked the last warmth particles, then he got up, grabbed the prayer’s sheepskin and dragged it outside. The old woman was building a fire in the courtyard. He sat on the rug beside her and dozed off on her lap to the measures of the burning branches, waking up when the glowing heat pulled him so violently that he imagined himself urinating freely to extinguish it. He ran to the stables, and there in the reedy shed as he gazed into an invisible pit, he remembered the time when one of his cousins was bit by a snake on the butt, and he giggled so hard that he smeared his pants.
The old woman grabbed a kettle nestled in the smoldering logs and told him to call on his grandfather for tea. Sitting by the spring’s eye, the old man sharpened his knife on a rock and grazed his chin by the outlines of his image on the water. It was not bright enough to reflect the thick eyelids slanting like a compass over his angry gaze. The kid grabbed the knife before the old man could put it back in his jacket, he opened it and went slashing throats in the air until they reached the house.
The tea tray was arranged. The kid cut the sharper ends from the barley bread and dipped them into a bowl of date syrup and ate them with great relish. The grandfather took a leather flask from his inside pocket, opened it, and held the tea kettle to the flask’s lips for some seconds. He filled his pipe afterward and smoked it thoughtfully, while taking resonant sips from the bottle. During this time the grandmother murmured at her beads and kept watch over them, filling the breadbasket and heating the kettle.
When they finished, they went outside again. A gust of wind, heavy with the promises of rain, blew in their faces. The kid helped his grandfather get four sacks of pomegranates into an old truck and climbed in the back. At first, the car moved so slowly that he was able to jump from it whenever he saw a dark shrub, his arm searched deftly between the thorns until he felt the sandberries. He stuffed his pockets and ran back to the truck. They moved at full speed when they reached the tarred road. The kid closed the knife and opened it. He enjoyed the silvery ripple it made. He firmly grabbed the wooden handle, passed a metallic fingernail along the spine and studied the mysterious letters wrought upon its curved eye.
That is hardly anything more satisfying than cutting the protruding lips of a pomegranate with a sharp knife and then staring at its deep, crimson-colored crystals. The kid cut one after another and stamped them with his foot on the floor panel of the car until his grandfather honked three times warningly. He urinated on the road, drawing a very long snake, then he fell on the sacks and began peeling the collected sandberries with his tongue. The thin shells had the sour taste of leaves but he kept munching and storing the naked pebbles in his mouth, as unmindful as a camel.
The sky was dark, and he was very happy. When the sun’s absence finally materialized into rain and sleet, he jumped inside through the window of the passenger’s seat. The old man didn’t say anything. He held the steering wheel firmly with one hand and was fixing the radio knob to a foreign station with the other, mumbling satirical comments to himself. The kid inhaled strings of naphthalene with the smell of old leather, he listened to the rain beating on the roof. The windshield wipers swept the water in vigorous repetition. It was just like the Nautilus; he wished that the voyage would never end.
Soon afterwards, they stood beneath the looming towers of the village. The truck slithered its way inside and then climbed laboriously between the clay houses until it settled on a large clearance. It was filled with goats and snake charmers and ostrich eggs, a regular country fair. When the pomegranate sacks were unloaded, the kid set off to explore the area. He met a bunch of other kids and befriended them quickly. They convinced him to accompany them on a quest to hunt the uromastyx. He conceded that the lizard’s tail was the most delicious thing on earth, although he had never tasted it, trying all the while to hide his hands because they began to assume their original hue.
Once in the outskirts of the village, the other kids led him behind a dark shrub. The shortest one, who appeared to be the leader of the gang, ordered him to pull down his pants. He instinctively understood that his whole being was on the line. The sun suddenly sucked all the shade around him, and he saw them for what they really were, four grown-up boys, with heads tonsured and yellow teeth emerging from drab, brown garments. The short one jumped toward him and tipped him over. They fell on each other and wrestled clumsily for a long time, until the kid pulled the thick strands and dashed the naked scalp on a rock. When he recovered his breath, he felt the absurdity of the fight and wanted to put an end to it. As the short boy fell unconscious, he removed his cloak, and there, on the bare skin of his upper buttocks, he flashed the knife and copied its letters. The other three, who kept watching all this time, hailed him finally as a champion.
The sun was bloodletting over distant streetlights. I had been drooling for quite some time and didn’t notice when the others left, even when they pulled their bags and left me in a chiropteran position. Venus of Willendorf vanished too, I was the only passenger left in the car. I was surprised to see the welcome sign of what has become a town. The rugged hills were two blunt rocks crowned with a transmission tower, right where the double mausoleum of the saint used to stand. I could see from the car that low-rise apartment buildings and freshly paved roads have replaced the old settlement. Just before the entrance arc, I recognized the shape of a plant and told the driver to stop. I walked toward it and buried my arm in that entanglement of pain. I retrieved a sandberry. This is a negative fruit, I thought, you are supposed to scratch the sandy outer skin and throw the hard pebble away. I swallowed the entire thing. “The village is no longer an allegory,” I cried out loud, the scream was so deliberate and artificial that I felt ashamed for a moment, but I added more calmly to myself “I’m free!” I could hear the cataracts coming from far away. I knelt down and unzipped my pants in the local fashion, with the right knee on the sand and the left leg planted in a right angle, all over the roots of the shrub I made a most glorious unburdening.
When I returned to the car, the driver was smiling stupidly. He asked me what was written, in very slow and deliberate words, while on his face was fixed a most bovine and lingering glance, the look was so brazenly familiar that I started to get mad, and then I remembered that this was the local way of cracking a joke, as they stretch the outskirts of a simple sentence until they meet a convenient response. I smiled to erase the look on his face and told him to go back, doubling his whole fare. The front seat still retained the smell and sweat of the woman. I grew an erection so fantastic that I had to use the novel as a cover. With the sun that would certainly rise again over that painted ugliness and all the symbols and allegories to my back, I was determined to follow the scent of life and what’s underneath the book.
It is now completely dark, and the sun is menstruating somewhere over the Atlantic. I can’t however enjoy this calm interlude. Not only does the absolute consciousness of the illogical return of day abolish my dream but a very lucid drowsiness is invading me. I don’t know if I’m holding the book upside down again but since the village is no longer an allegory, isn’t that the more inducement to enter it? Did I just reason away my cowardice into a glorious triumph, a false conquest of the past? When I realized that, something itched like an answer in my lower back. I felt the bare skin and a pattern of gothic lettering was sewn between my fingers.
© Cainhurst
Cainhurst is from Algeria, once the land of Augustin and Donatus Magnus, he holds a PhD in French literature and enjoys writing in English.
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