First published in 2011 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2008 by Hassouna Mosbahi
First published in Arabic in 2008 by Dar Kaleem as Hikaya tunisiya
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright © 2011 by Max Weiss
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 24412/11
eISBN: 978 161 797 172 3
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mosbahi, Hassouna
A Tunisian Tale/ Hassouna Mosbahi.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011
p. cm.
eISBN: 978 161 797 172 3
1. Arabic fiction
I. Title
892.73
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11
Designed by Fatiha Bouzidi
Printed in Egypt
“There is no folly of the beasts of the
earth which is not infinitely outdone
by the madness of men.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
THE SON
Now my soul has calmed, and its volcanoes have quieted down. Those conflagrations that for many years used to eat away at my body have been extinguished and nothing remains of them but clumps of ash. Here I am now, as cold as the dead. This cell is as narrow as a tomb, and just as cold. Everything on the inside and on the outside suggests I’ve already crossed over that bridge to the other world, the unknown world that everyone fears even though we all know we’re going to wind up there sooner or later. Before they ever threw me in jail and slammed the thick iron door shut behind me, I had seen myself dead, even as my heart still pounded and my senses were as heightened as those of a cat burglar. I can safely say that the frowning men who will be entrusted with my execution at dawn, those whose cold stares have been with them since they first fell out of their mother’s bellies, won’t get the satisfaction they’ve become accustomed to receiving upon executing their duty, because all they’re going to find in this cold narrow cell is a cold corpse, nothing more and nothing less. In that moment they’ll be as deflated as those who go out hunting and come back empty-handed, but that won’t prevent them from carrying out the dirty work they willingly signed up for. Maybe they think that hanging miserable creatures like me assures a place for them in heaven. As for me, I’m interested in neither heaven nor hell.
Since I will have already departed this life some time before, my heart won’t beat with panic upon hearing their heavy footsteps on the cement corridor at dawn, and I won’t shiver as those silent, mute, and frowning men lead me to the gallows. I won’t shed a single tear for the world I leave behind at twenty-four years of age. I won’t beg them for mercy or compassion. No, my lips will be sealed, my eyes vacant, and my body as stiff as a board, no longer concerned with things like how to skin the ewe after its slaughter.
THE MOTHER
I speak from beyond the grave. Can you believe this, O living people? Your response doesn’t matter much to me because I can’t hear it anyway, but let me assure you that just a short while ago the merciful angel whispered to inform me that I can address you from the furthest reaches of eternal darkness. What a treat for you, and for me, too! I had always believed that speaking to you would become impossible once I departed your world and turned into a clump of ash. So listen up, and I’ll tell you my story from start to finish. I’ll regale you with all of its details. They may please you at times, horrify you at others, and might even make you feel sympathy for me and take pity upon me, or else become repulsed and then recoil in disgust. Anything’s possible. But rest assured that I’ll always be honest with you, and I won’t neglect to mention a single detail, no matter how pretty or ugly it may seem, because I know all too well that you are just as curious as the people of M Slum, where I lived ever since leaving my faraway village at the age of nineteen, up until that simmering summer day when flames consumed my body. In the real world, the people of M Slum—from the toddler who has just managed to take his first steps, all the way up to the old man kneeling at the doorstep of his goddamned house waiting for Azrael to take him away—used to spy on me night and day, through the keyholes of their doors, from their windows, rooftops, and balconies. They used to keep tabs on me. They would dispatch unemployed and broke young men—and there were a lot of them in the neighborhood—to gather information about me, to find out who was going in and out of my house. Most of the men were also out of work, and they’d spend hours on end in those filthy cafés, smoking and playing cards, gossiping about me even more than they ever talked about soccer matches or about Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They’d embellish upon what were primarily invented and fraudulent stories they’d heard before with still other stories that were ripped from the fabric of their imagination, which would become more and more fanciful whenever the matter concerned me in particular. Women would do the very same thing, spraying gasoline on the fire until their sharp tongues had transformed me into a terrible ogress who not only spread evil and vice and corruption throughout M Slum but throughout the capital as well, all around the country even. Most of the inhabitants were migrants from the mountains and the distant deserts who had fled famines and plagues. In spring and summer M Slum teems with gnats and all kinds of stinging insects like scorpions; in the fall it buzzes with relentless flies; and in winter it gets covered with mud and clay. The youths and men and women in that miserable slum would get creative in setting up traps to make me fall down, but I’d manage to find a way out somehow, in what always seemed like a miracle.
None of this should be too strange or surprising. Those people had suckled on wickedness and vileness and depravity along with their mother’s milk, and their spirits would only be at peace once they had succeeded in causing so-and-so to fall into one of their repeatedly set traps, once they had successfully sowed evil here or there. The men constantly insulted me, seeking revenge because I had always despised them, loathed their filthiness, and recoiled from their vile ugliness. Whenever they tried to lure me in or get close to me I would stop them with violence and severity. Many of them would treat me kindly in secret, though, sending me romantic love letters; some would confess to me whenever I walked by how their hearts would nearly stop beating when I was around. But as soon as they got home or sat down in one of those miserable little cafés where they were always hanging out, they’d start flaying me, tearing at my flesh, and they wouldn’t quit until their tongues wore out and turned to stone inside their putrid mouths. As for the women, they intentionally tried to hurt me and tarnish my reputation out of sheer jealousy, making up stories about how bad I smelled because not a single one of
