A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me by Youssef Fadel

Author:Youssef Fadel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2016-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

13

Day Five

I ASKED JOUMANA WHY HER father the general doesn’t laugh. She said that he’s always been like that, that she’d never seen him laugh, not even once. He has a cold disposition and a dry temperament. Perhaps that is why he covers his face with black sunglasses, and has requested that they be buried with him. Then she showed me some x-rays. His heart is as small and shrunken as a piece of burned rubber. Doctors have advised him multiple times that he should laugh more in order to prevent further shrinkage and hardening, but despite this advice his lips rarely part in a smile. When he settled in the Sahara he tried bringing along a number of jesters and deformed freaks, but he got rid of them after less than a week. She also said that he has an excess of bile in his spleen, and that this is what causes the aggression and bouts of fury he’s known for and that worsen in the winter months, and for this too there is no treatment other than laughter. “The bile is infected too,” said the doctors, “and no medicine will be of any use to him except for laughter.” But what can be done if the body doesn’t comply? The doctors advised him to start doing laughing exercises, little by little, like a medication taken in small doses until one becomes accustomed to it, because sudden laughter can also kill. This is why he brought the jesters and the freaks to his farm.

I said to Joumana, “He has to keep practicing, especially someone like him who’s trying to find laughter for the first time.”

His Excellency thought that the matter was this simple? But how many years does it take a man to regenerate his blood? An entire lifetime perhaps, and that’s how it is with laughter too. A disposition that is closed and hard requires a lifetime to transform itself into one that is open to the world and to people in all their seriousness and silliness, harshness and levity, intelligence and stupidity. He didn’t get this, but tried to enter a new world: the world of satire. What did he expect? What exactly was His Excellency expecting? That his heart would just open up to laughter, free of charge, for nothing? I understand perfectly well why the general doesn’t laugh. It’s because of the uniform. Once you put a uniform on in order to become another person, the person who was there just moments before is hardly recognizable, as if a demon takes you over, whips you into a frenzy, and pushes you to kill the first man you run into.

His youngest daughter settled into the room that was intended for her father. His daughter Joumana, after wandering from one void to another, decided that she was going to become a professional photographer, so she came to photograph the Sahara, to capture what her father had never been able to see during his quick tours of duty.

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