Proud Beggars (6 page)

He had just noticed something extraordinary: the gold bracelets were only cheap trash. They had never been gold, and Gohar had always known that. Even a child would have known that, he thought. How could he have made such a gross error? He couldn't understand it. These bracelets were maybe worth a few piasters, and he had murdered to get them.

He was now very calm. The shock of his mistake had completely sobered him. He left the corpse, picked up his tarboosh which had rolled onto the bed, put the letter in his pocket, and headed for the door. The waiting room was still dark and deserted. Apparently no one had come in all this time. Gohar slowly descended the steps, entered the street with no apprehension, and casually greeted a passerby he didn't know, out of simple courtesy.

Throughout this whole adventure, he hadn't found Yeghen. Where was Yeghen hiding? This question troubled him for a long time.

THE KEROSENE
lamp spread its parsimonious light just to the table's edge. With his myopic gaze, Yeghen tried to make out his mother's shadowed face; he could see only her old withered hands busily mending a man's shirt: no doubt some job for a bourgeois family in town. The mediocrity of this thankless task irritated him like a personal insult, especially since she worked so hard to make it sad. What gravity, what seriousness in her gestures, as if they involved the creation of a better, mysterious world! By this humble task, she seemed to want to lend credibility to the myth of respectable poverty. What a sham!

Yeghen laughed. What made him study his mother's face this evening? It was an idiotic, unhealthy idea. For a moment, across the years and wrinkles of his mother's face, he struggled to find a resemblance to his own. He opened his eyes wide and scrutinized the shadows outside the lamp's circle of light: nothing. His mother's face remained an enigma. He searched his memory trying to recall her features; it was impossible to summon up a good image. A black hole. It was as if he had never looked at her during all these years. He grew exasperated before the absolute abyss of his memory, wanting to ask her to lean toward the light a little, but he refrained. He didn't want to trouble her needlessly. He even felt a wave of generosity toward her. “She must have been very beautiful. I must take after my father.” He had no memory of his father either. All the same, it was strange! It now seemed to him that he had never seen up close these people who had brought him into the world and with whom he had lived for years.

But why was he particularly preoccupied with his ugliness this evening? Usually he never even glanced in a mirror. He was afraid, he admitted to himself, that he might frighten himself accidentally. Again, he laughed. The bastards! With what fury they continued to mock him in the newspapers and literary reviews of the capital. He had become the laughingstock of the entire cultivated Orient. Those infamous journalists never missed a shot at him; they undoubtedly received a bonus each time they featured his ugliness in their venomous articles. And that bastard cartoonist who had published a drawing of Yeghen with the caption “Condensed Ugliness.” Yeghen found these attacks remarkably weak, at best worthy of little children. Did these imbeciles seriously think they could upset him with such idle chatter? They didn't know him; his ugliness was a real force of nature.

Perhaps that was indeed the case, except when Yeghen found himself before a judge in correctional court. That was the weak point. He could not be defended. The poor lawyers assigned to his defense lost the little dignity they had and became nearly speechless from shock. They stammered a vague plea without ever looking at him. What a bunch of eunuchs! He despised them more than anything. With the exception of one, whom he would never forget. This one—a man of unprecedented courage, or else simply a humorist—had found a way of comparing Yeghen's face to that of unrecognized genius. He spoke for an hour. The judge hadn't laughed; he only seemed overwhelmed, unable to understand. The lawyer's harangue ended in a silence of stupefaction and incredulity. The judge couldn't believe his ears; he looked around with a befuddled expression as if coming out of a dream. Finally he got hold of himself and pronounced sentence.

That time the sentence was stiffer than usual: eight months. But Yeghen was happy; he'd had a devil of a good time.

These periods in prison weren't at all disagreeable for someone like him, able to adapt to circumstances. Instead, they were a kind of repose after the constant fatigue of his nomadic life. Each time he went back in, he reclaimed his position as bookkeeper in the penitentiary administration. This job, which was his by an unspoken assumption, allowed him a certain freedom of movement, and he cut a figure as a great administrator. His talents did not go unrecognized in high places—he was heartily congratulated. All this was grotesque, but it allowed Yeghen to enjoy himself enormously. As soon as he arrived, the odious building, constructed to dishearten men, resounded with tumultuous joy. His jokes and humorous ideas delighted his companions, for the most part inclined to the sadness inherent in their condition. Even the jailers lost their habitual surliness, allowing themselves a certain affability. The prison warden—a passionate admirer of Yeghen's poems—loved to converse with him; he received him in his office with the deference due a government minister. So, for Yeghen, life in prison continued as on the outside. In one sense, it was even better: he had no material worries. He was housed, fed, and surrounded by convicts, each one more outrageous than the next, bursting with savory stories that were as funny as they were violent. Freedom was an abstract notion and a bourgeois prejudice. You could never make Yeghen believe he wasn't free. As for drugs, he had nothing to complain about. Hashish circulated inside the prison walls with the same facility as in town; one could procure it in a thousand ways provided one had money.

His reputation as a poet had given him immense prestige among his illiterate companions. He was the one who “married”—what a mockery!—the convict couples. In truth, his ugliness preserved him from a real danger: one would have to be blind to want to sodomize him. Fortunately there were no blind men in prison.

Again he tried to penetrate the mystery of his mother's face hidden in the shadows. Everything grew confused before his myopic gaze. Should he move the lamp aside? The circle of light created an impassable desert between them. Groaning like a sick child, he fidgeted on his chair. There was no change of position on the other side of the table; his mother didn't even tremble.

“Mother!” The word came out almost against his will.

She remained silent, as if his call—which was almost a cry—couldn't reach her in the world of suffering and resignation in which she was foundering. A poor old woman doing a humble but honest job, she continued to mend the shirt. Her whole attitude strained to prove that there were honest trades. And he should profit from her example. Her way of teaching him moral lessons was truly exasperating. What did she take him for?

“Mother!”

Her fingers stopped abruptly, the needle half stuck in the shirt. A silence hung over the room for what seemed an eternity. His mother uttered not a word, as if she were afraid to break the spell by speaking. Finally, resigned to the worst, she asked, “What is it?”

“Tell me, Mother, was I handsome when I was little?”

The malice of that question! He knew he was causing her a horrible pang of conscience. What would she do? Begin to cry, or answer? Yeghen could only imagine the panic that must have possessed her. He could still see only her withered hands, now resting on the edge of the table. Wanting to fluster her even more, he moved his face into the lamplight, so she could better judge this mask of human derision. Now she couldn't equivocate; he had her. He wore a mischievous smile that bared his long, rotten teeth, giving his face a monstrous look.

Truly, there was nothing there to gladden a mother's heart.

Seeming to rouse herself from a thousand-year torpor, she looked at her son with love and pity. A thirty-five-year-old man who was as lost in life as a child. More unaware, more vulnerable even than a child. She had a moment's hesitation that Yeghen savored deliciously. “She must be having a terrible time,” he thought to himself. Deep down he was certain of her answer.

“Well, Mother?”

“Yes, you were handsome,” she said.

“It's not possible! How could I have changed so much?”

“You haven't changed,” said his mother.

She must be crazy. Yeghen was tempted to go look at himself in a mirror. For a moment he believed that a miracle had transformed his face. But no, it was simpler than that. He should have known that in its mother's eyes a monkey has the grace of a gazelle. No reason to delude himself. It wasn't even pity; it was an answer torn from maternal fiber. He had the impression she was happy with her answer and that she sincerely believed it.

“And my father?”

“What about your father?”

“Was he handsome?”

“Your father was an honorable man.”

“What a joke!”

Yeghen quivered with joy. His father! How many times had she repeated that his father was an honorable man! And yet it was his fault that they had been reduced to poverty. Heir to a great family of landowners, he had squandered his immense fortune in gambling and fabulous orgies. He died leaving only debts. Yeghen had been very young at the time; the death of his father, the ruin, had hardly touched him. He had learned of his father's incredible escapades from gossip. A man who needed at least three women in bed to feel comfortable. A veritable Oriental potentate.

His mother had never talked to Yeghen about him; she considered it an indecent subject: one didn't judge one's husband. She must have believed that suffering at the hands of one's husband was an enviable, ineluctable fate. Yeghen had never heard her pronounce a single word of reproach against his late father; she continued to believe that he was an honorable man. “Riches excuse everything,” he thought. “My antics displease her because they bear the stain of poverty.” The poor did not have the right to misbehave. For her, this axiom constituted the only truth on earth.

To survive, she was now reduced to this humiliating work, mending clothes for some bourgeois family who took pity on her misfortune. All these years of bitter fighting with this useless son marked by a frightful destiny had not changed at all her opinion of the unspeakable behavior of her husband. Hadn't he been a rich, respected man? That excused everything. Such fidelity to the privileged class was unthinkable for Yeghen, but it was the only thing that still kept her alive. The memory of her dead husband had no aim but to preserve this respect owed to wealth.

In this basement room with its defective tiling, moisture was trickling down the walls. A musty smell of bourgeois security persisted despite the slow decay of the furniture, the perfidious, drastic misery. Among the incongruous objects bathed in shadow, a skillfully carved wooden buffet that she had managed to save from disaster stood out, enthroned against the wall. It was this buffet that created the equivocal atmosphere in the room that so oppressed Yeghen. He would have preferred to sleep in the street rather than live in this miserable flat oozing respectability. It seemed to him that the buffet—a shapeless bulk in the shadows—was threatening him with its utter contempt. Yeghen shivered. It was cold, and there was nothing to heat this glacial cavern but the little spirit lamp on which soup was cooking. He felt sadness sweep through him—just what he dreaded most when he came to visit his mother. She was skilled in the art of distilling sadness; she spun misery like a spider its web.

Yeghen shook himself, as if to chase away the cold. He felt a rustling against his leg, then heard a soft purring: the cat. Where had it been hiding? He leaned down to get it, put it on his lap, and began to stroke it. The little animal purred, its eyes fixed on him, as if waiting for something. One day Yeghen had decided to have a bit of fun by giving the cat a miniscule ball of hashish, and since then, he had done so each time he had the chance. It was surely the only cat in the world that indulged in narcotics. It seemed to have acquired a taste for this delicacy; it began to grow edgy and tried to scratch him. Yeghen found himself in a delicate situation; he only had a small quantity of the drug and he certainly wasn't going to share it with the cat. A whim had its limits. But how could he make it understand?

He managed to get rid of the cat and again looked at his mother. She had returned to her work, as though she were indifferent to everything but her inner dream. She must be dreaming that she was living a peaceful existence with her son—an honest, hardworking son—with dignity and respect for the law. Yeghen intuited this dream; he could even divine the exact unreeling of the images. He suddenly thought of his latest idea, the ultimate inspiration of his inventive genius. If she ever suspected that he was about to beg money for her burial! He was tempted to tell her, just to see her face. Would she curse him? She had never before used that privilege. A mother's curse! Yeghen couldn't help laughing.

She abruptly stopped sewing and seemed surprised and shocked.

“How can you laugh, my son?”

“You want me to cry?”

“You're not ashamed to mock my misery?”

“It's not that, Mother. It's simply that an idea came to me.”

“I don't understand,” she said bitterly. “I will never understand. How can you laugh in this miserable house!”

This she could never forgive: his frivolity in the face of misery. He never appeared to take misery seriously. She would have liked to see him ashamed and resigned, moping his life away. How could he laugh at the sacred state of misery?

Anyway, it was time for him to go; the atmosphere was becoming oppressive. He shrank down in his chair, withdrew deeper into the shadows, and grinned. The most difficult part was yet to come.