The Valiant Little Tailor: A Novel by Éric Chevillard

Author:Éric Chevillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press

The Story of Salem al-Ayari

He was a little guy, that Salem al-Ayari.

Oh, not tall, not tall at all!

A figure of fun. Ha ha, look how tiny!

No more visible from close up than from a distance!

Just a few inches more and he’d be a dwarf!

He was attacked by a germ? What a brawl!

An ideal target for jeering was Salem al-Ayari. The source of endless derision.

If you wanted to liven up a dull gathering, all you had to do was toss his name out on the rug.

And it all started up again, the stinging japes, the sarcasm, the snickering.

It pained him, the poor man, because his heart was ardent and he sensed within himself the strength to lift worlds. And then to set them into orbit along carpeted courses, around less mercurial suns.

But Salem al-Ayari was weak.

Oh! so weak.

Beyond all description, sand between words’ fingers.

Stunted slipped off his shoulders, runt pooled in folds at his feet.

Are you starting to form an image of that diminutive personage?

If you are, it’s still too big.

Cut it in half.

For Salem, the weight of lead could also be felt in soufflé, in silk.

Simply by laying on his hands he could transform a marble into a ridiculous cannonball, impossible to play with.

A goldfinch’s hatchlings would not have found the climate in the Garden of the Hesperides more temperate than the blows his fists rained down.

He was a lifelong laughingstock in the village where he first opened his eyes. He was welcomed into this world with a guffaw. All the blood in his veins spurted from that wound.

Were the suitcase holding his spare shirt and three handkerchiefs not so heavy, he would long since have gone on his way.

Farewell.

No two ways about it.

He would have taken to the road and searched the big, wide world for a more congenial land—which he would alas have found only at the outermost reaches of the most remote expanses of emptiness. Because man is the same on all the seven shores of this world, he’s hard and he’s cruel, my friends.

And so he stayed.

He endured the mockery. His heart did not become embittered, but he preferred to live far from society, and avoided his fellow men.

Because human company was made for dogs.

He kept to his tiny house on the edge of the village.

That too inspired laughter.

“Salem’s got even littler,” people would say. “Now you can’t see him at all.”

And they clutched their sides, they rolled on the ground. They gasped for breath between two hiccups. Their eyes poured out tears more sincere than at their father’s deathbed.

For an entire year, Salem al-Ayari never showed himself. Time even began to pass between two jokes at his expense.

Fortunately, Abdalomin, the newly arrived fava bean seller, saved the people from boredom and melancholy with his exceedingly long, wide ears.

Afflicted with the same design flaw as the ostrich’s wings, they didn’t let him fly either.

“Hey! Abdalomin! Take a few steps back, will you, there’s something I want to whisper in your ear!”

And the village recovered its legendary merriment.

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