A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery

Author:Albert Cossery [Cossery, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2010-05-25T05:00:00+00:00

: VI :

teymour was waiting for felfel in front of the statue of The Awakening of the Nation. In her stylized peasant dress the woman was still raising her arm to encourage a heedless people to revive but, as if responding to her ludicrous call, against the metal railing that surrounded the monument, a vagrant was sleeping, snoring shamelessly and thus undermining the morale of his fellow citizens with his unfortunate conduct; whether by coincidence or design, serious damage was being done to the government’s attempt—by means of this insomniac and imperious peasant woman—to rouse the crowds from their torpor. Teymour endorsed heart and soul the act of this beggar, whose ostensible ignorance concealed an age-old wisdom. The young man was now in a position to appreciate the humor of such a spectacle, seeing in it the expression of the lucidity of an entire people impervious to the entreaties of a propaganda so obviously tendentious. Not so long ago, the vagrant’s attitude would have insulted Teymuor’s intelligence and reinforced his bitterness; now it seemed the only legitimate reaction to the attempt to reduce a people to slavery that lay behind the esthetic of this modern sculpture. Denouncing its decadent symbolism by means of the most passive attitude of all—sleep—showed, he thought, a remarkable ferocity and was imbued with much more meaning than anything any rebellious intellectual, tangled up in his pronouncements, could have done or said against the system that had created the statue to serve its villainous cause. This revelation led him to have joyous confidence in the future and completely transformed his vision of things; already he no longer thought much about all those years spent abroad, and the memories he still retained of them no longer struck the same painful chords. As if trying to help him forget that period of his life, none of his acquaintances ever asked the slightest question about the countries in which he had resided, nor did they seem interested in what he might have done there. At first he found this odd conspiracy of silence somewhat distressing. He could not understand their reserve and thought it almost insulting. He had especially suffered from not being able to recount certain adventures to Medhat; his old friend showed himself to be particularly unreceptive to confidences of this sort, as if he found Teymour’s long absence entirely negligible, nonexistent even. However, having searched and searched for the motives of such indifference, Teymour wound up suspecting that his friends were trying, by their tact, to help him forget a past that they sensed he still missed deep down. He was touched by this show of thoughtfulness, and had done his best to be worthy of their esteem by adapting as quickly as possible to his new existence and by erasing from his behavior and his appearance all traces that could have markedly set him apart from his surroundings. To this end, he’d given up his lavish clothing with its foreign cut and fabric that made him look like a sad-faced tourist roaming the catacombs.

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