Fanon (28 page)

Doctor Fanon, you have a visitor. A lady, doctor.

He touches his necktie's assumed perfection, the dark knot of it exactly centered bulging from white wings of his collar. He's prepared. This ushering and announcing of visitors a formality. He knows perfectly well the shape of his day, the sequence of appointments and phone calls scheduled between them, the bedside consultations in the wards, evenings observing and interacting with his patients in the therapeutic social activities he arranges for them. As resident psychiatrist at Blida, with endless demands on every thimbleful of his time, he must organize and prepare meticulously. Much of his energy exhausted planning how to execute a thorough yet efficient passage through the maze of his patients' illnesses. Their symptoms create the shape of each working day, working days never-ending it seems, all his waking hours and most of his fitful sleep consumed by his patients' demands, a situation bearable, perhaps, only because the alternative is worse. Anything better than empty time
alone when the ever-present sous-conversation, sometimes a barely perceptible murmur, sometimes a roaring in his ears, takes over, that conversation with other voices and himself about the inevitable failure of all undertakings, the cruel setbacks, total crash of cures patient and doctor devise, unspeakable exchanges he cannot ignore whose only theme is futility, a running negative commentary from the world outside the Blida clinic critiquing his efforts inside the Blida clinic.
What about the massacres, doctor. Have you heard there's a rebellion in the hills. doctor, doctor, I'm mad, I'm ill, I'm a native, a god, a dog. You could help us defeat them, doctor. You 're one of us. Not one of them. Whose color. Whose skin. Whose flag do you serve, doctor. You 're a doctor, not a soldier, doctor. If you touch me with those black hands, doctor, I'll scream.
In the muddle of voices, his often the loudest, mocking the logic of his routines, his plans, the hopeful words passing between patient and physician. Endless hours in clinic and ward dull the sous-conversation, sustain the illusion that all's well, or partly well at least. He's a doctor, after all, performing his duties, ready for the rigors of the day. He knows his name, his trade, he'll be prepared with practiced face to meet the first patient's trepidation or relief or hypocrisy or naive faith or loathing.

To amuse himself he pretends he's forgotten who he is. Forgotten who waits on the other side of the office door. Plays dumb. Feigns total ignorance of what he's supposed to be doing in the next eighteen or twenty hours. Forgets the consequences of forgetting, forsakes the safety zone where he can pretend to be one kind of man, a doctor in charge, running the show, at least until fatigue and the weight of self-deception, the weight of lying to his patients brings him to his knees again and he hears the rattling of his chains, the moans and screams of the others locked in the hold with him. He plays innocent. Slips the yoke and turns the joke. As if he doesn't know what's come before and coming next. As if he can't look through the wall and see
who's being announced when the nurse descends from the sky and pokes her head in the door. You have a visitor, doctor. A lady...

Good day, madame ... sir ... let's see ... hmmmm ... are you a torturer or one of the tortured. The question he never asks though the mischief-making part of him entertains asking it, goads his professional persona by pointing out the usefulness of such an inquiry. Why not commence each interview with simple questions. Insane or sane. French or Algerian. Black or white. Living or dead. Allow the patients to declare themselves and thereby begin to cure themselves. The physician's job no more nor less than grasping whatever thread the patient offers, holding on, following it through the labyrinth. Saving each other.

From the podium he sees a brown sea of faces, brown broken here and there by a few islands of whiteness, particularly in the rows closest to the stage and then as his gaze lifts toward the auditorium's rear the faces become one color, no color where the house lights dim and an overhanging balcony sinks all faces in uniform darkness, and out there, just beyond and below the balcony, a busy traffic of delegates through a pair of double doors admitting and expelling light each time they swing open, doors at the ends of the aisles that divide the interior into three sections, a massive wedge of seats in the middle, a narrow band of seats along each wall, the hall's design configuring the audience just like politics divides he thinks or like the divisions of human nature that politics mirror, he thinks, the center squeezed by the margins, the margins squeezed out by the center, and he wonders who will come forward first, someone from the right flank or left flank or center to seize one of the microphones set up for a Q-and-A session scheduled to follow his keynote speech, one mike at the foot of each aisle, just before the pit or apron or moat dividing
stage from the first row of seats. Will the conference delegates descend to the mikes with the same urgency and determination they exhibit hustling out of the doors at the back of the auditorium. A steady stream so the doors are blinking eyes or like flashbulbs popping to steal snapshots of each delegate who enters or leaves. Perhaps urgent state business summons the fleeing delegates. Or too much wine at lunch for overworked middle-aged kidneys perhaps. Doubtless these diplomats and bureaucrats and reporters and exiles and spies and intellectuals without portfolios are all extremely busy people, busy men he should say since almost all are men, men who, before they enter rooms where conference business is conducted, shed the young women you see them chatting up in the lobbies, the halls, the streets, the women they escort to bars and restaurants surrounding the conference center. Where do these women disappear when the men are here, Fanon wonders. Wherever the women are, is that where the delegates are running. Running to take care of business. State business. Man business. Woman business. Monkey business. Who knows who's paying whom to do what. Who finances the errands, meetings, exchanges in the city's best downtown hotels where even in this so-called black man's country at least half the guests look white.

At the swinging doors delegates get in each other's way, no labored courtesies, no bows or handshakes, no you-first-Alphonse-no-you-Gaston comedy, the delegates busy men too much in a hurry to acknowledge one another, unhappy to be caught a naked second in the lobby's glare, rushing away from the glare of this important conference hosting important people. Fanon follows them after they escape through the doors, patting ties, neatening the drape of briefcases, smoothing a rich fabric's invisible wrinkles, brushing dust from immaculate lapels. Delegates wearing the tight-lipped smile of a well-dressed person emerging from a public restroom who avoids the
gaze of the next in line, declaring himself or herself innocent of shitting or pissing like an animal on the other side of the door.

Scanning through the auditorium's walls into its bright lobby, Fanon observes delegates displaying conspicuous lack of interest in whatever might be transpiring inside the hall, there a delegate hovering near the entrance for the next chance to enter unobtrusively as a delegate departs, here a cluster of delegates smoking, chattering a discreet distance from the doors, there delegates forming a second front in the lobby around a bearded, well-known attendee's impromptu lecture, here a pair of delegates, each sneaking peeks over the other's shoulder while nodding vigorous assent to the other's words, words, words—words you might guess, from the concerned, earnest gazes the delegates pass back and forth, at least as significant to humanity's struggle as any speech delivered from the podium. Some delegates pass in or out of the doors and glide through the lobby elegantly, expertly as they shuttle through VIP lounges of international airports.

Seated on the podium, Fanon despairs. How will anyone hear him, how will he hear himself above the buzz in the lobby, limo doors slammed, helicopters taking off, planes landing, terrorist bombs exploding, the whisper of expensive trousers rubbing well-fed thighs. He watches a hand sliding down a row of plush seatbacks as a delegate extricates himself from a front center seat, excuse me, excuse me, please, thank you, thank you, the delegate guiding himself by the feel of the seats, politely trampling others' feet, battering their knees, then hurrying, almost a sprint on tiptoe up the aisle to the door where his picture is snapped, and he blinks and bumps slightly a delegate entering as he leaves, the newcomer's eyes accustoming themselves to darkness, searching out an empty space to occupy until pressing affairs summon him away.

Who passes out masks and forces the delegates to wear them. Who
decides the masks must be black or white. What colors lie beneath the masks. Will I live to see their faces unveiled, Fanon wonders. When delegates return home, would they be visible without black masks or white masks. Will they ever be free to remove their masks or only exchange white for black, black for white.

It's too late. Masks do not disguise truth. Masks are true. The pure, absolute, reassuring truth of black or white. Pure illusion. Pure white or pure black. Masks truer than the gray shadow staring back from a mirror, your unconvincing reflection that does not disguise the blazing emptiness behind it you pretend not to see.

Stop, Fanon tells himself. Delegates are not wearing masks. They are blind. The conference a school for the blind, teaching delegates to manage a world they cannot see. A world where sightlessness an asset not a handicap if you learn the rules, follow instructions. Everybody's blind, equally blind, equally secure and terrorized by blindness.

And who am I if not a delegate, Fanon asks. A delegate representing myself first and then others, perhaps. Yes and no, because who am I without those others. But I am not those others. Who pays my way. Whom do I owe. What am I demanding from other delegates attending the conference. Why should they risk anything on behalf of Algerians fighting for independence from France, Algerians I claim to represent. Do delegates gathered here represent anyone besides themselves. Do they love anyone.

My brother, my likeness.
He often recites those words of Baudelaire to remind himself that what he despises most in another is also always his own face mirrored in their features, his actions doubled by theirs. No matter how clinically accurate and irrefutable his observations of others, in the end he is the balky mule he lashes, the impatient rider straddling his own sweaty back.

Who am I. Why am I here, pretending to be someone solid, substantial I cannot be, someone pure and true I think I might wish to
be. The circle unbroken. Delegates are hostages. Hoods over our heads an act of mercy. Blinding us to the truth of our blindness.

Speak. Rise to the podium and speak. It's your turn now, Fanon.

A sea of faces waiting for him to strip off his clothes, dash into the water, and drown. His brothers armed with volleys of applause to fire at speakers who parade to the lectern, rooting them on, shooting them down one by one to cleanse the stage for the next pretender to the throne none of the little monarchs at home or sitting out there on their regal butts is prepared to relinquish until brute force deposes him,
vive le roi, vive le roi, le roi est mort.
Why such dire estimates of your brothers, Fanon. Why the small, suppressed tingle of excitement, of complicity upon sighting white faces scattered here and there in the front rows. In the hall colored faces could swallow uncolored faces as easily as tall waves gulp down churning limbs. Only a spattering of white faces. Some of those colored, no doubt. No doubt some of the uncolored more friendly, more simpatico, as is often the case, than many of the colored. Why is he quibbling over the meaning of these different shades of color or no color his gaze supplies. As if color makes a difference. Why ponder this incompleteness, these uncolored spaces that with a little effort could or should be painted differently. Would the absence of uncolored faces render a unanimous verdict on who belongs here, who owns the conference, who it serves. Why. Is he secretly pleased by a sprinkling of so-called whites, by the irony that the issue of their removal is on the conference agenda. Will they have a vote, yes or no, to erase themselves. Which is it—the presence or the absence of their faces that signifies the conference's success. Though few, are the few precious because without them the sea he's facing from the podium doesn't exist on the map of the larger world, the map that ancestors of these precious few drew centuries ago, the ancient map of wishful thinking, a cartoon map, really, outmoded then and now,
Beware, dragons be here,
a map with distortions of scale, flat-out lies and
conscious misrepresentations, embedded superstitions and ignorance, a map of dreams, a prettied-up picture of Europe's unspeakable nightmares and aspirations, a map adorned on its margins with occult symbols, coats of arms, saints, imps, mermaids, monsters, portraits of pale faces and pale bodies beautiful as angels, a fairy-tale map abiding till today, this very instant Fanon unseats himself and slowly walks toward the lectern for his turn to speak. Won't these very steps take their measure from the old map, his six or seven strides meaningless, not counting as steps, unless they are plotted on that old map of continents, countries, islands, and seas, the map drawn by a few dreaming hands, by the same ones, their numbers still small, who retain the power in their hands, their heads to draw the old map again and again and squeeze a whole world onto a parchment grid, making it, then and now, everybody's map, white brown black red yellow green, establishing scale and relationship among peoples, among things, determining the place of things, their absolute largeness, smallness, significance—Near East, Far East, West, First World, Third World, on top or down under—the map missing the sea of faces Fanon looks out upon, and no matter how deep and dense this sea appears to him, that immensity does not exist, cannot be located, a blank site, a
terre inconnue,
emptied of meaning once and forever by the mapmakers because they chose to render no shape for it, appended no names but theirs, left it as an invisible island floating, drowning, a hole, a fearful void in a greater sea that surrounds it, washes over it, conceals it from sight and time. Unless the map, as Fanon understands it, the map that erases him by erasing itself by erasing him, can be flipped over to its unwritten side and then perhaps you could begin a fresh drawing of the world.