The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laabi

Author:Abdellatif Laabi [Laâbi, Abdellatif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2013-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

13

LIFE RETURNED TO normal following the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The long evenings and nocturnal activities ceased. As darkness approached, everyone ate their dinner quickly and went to bed with the sun. Uncle Touissa disappeared once again. With him gone, it was difficult tvwo kill time in the evenings. The beginning of the school year was still some way off and Namouss was starting to find the days tediously long. In the clutches of idleness, he fell prey to a type of lethargy that took away his appetite and made him prone to solitude. The rooftop terrace became his favorite refuge. Lying in the sun weakened his mind and body even further, and when he persisted in staring fixedly at the star, he felt as if he was melting inside a boiling cauldron. He was then torn between allowing himself to dissolve and a vague instinct of self-preservation. While walking this fine line, the images of the incident at Small Springs came back to mind. He was biting down on the woman’s hand until he drew blood as he lay on top of her. The woman let him bite her without reacting, without letting out a cry. The noise around them became deafening. Then the white cloud enveloped them before seeping into his flesh and pouring a freezing liquid into his organs.

Namouss never mentioned the incident to his parents. Neither did he confide in his friends. Knowing words would fail him when it came to describing what had happened, he kept it a closely guarded secret.

The lethargy that invaded him would sometimes be accompanied by a sensation of another kind. A peculiar sort of energy flowed through his veins, provoking a tingling sensation across his skin, from the tip of his toes to his head. A new feeling, which he’d never known before, awakened in him. Before that summer, he had hardly ever paid attention to his body. At the hammam, he had no choice, of course. When his mother undressed him to change his clothes, he wanted it to be done as quickly as possible. When his friends decided to hold pissing contests to determine whose jet could spray the farthest, it had been difficult not to sneak a look at his cohorts’ willies and compare them. But then things took an altogether different turn. His rooted sense of propriety was being sapped by an intense curiosity in his own body. And he made a few pleasant discoveries. First came his hands, which he deemed gracious, then his feet, which he thought rather pretty. Then he felt his cheeks, lips, and gradually progressed to his chest and belly. Having reached the middle, he hesitated, even though that’s where the tingling he felt was strongest, and where there was an enticing stiffness that just waited for him to grab hold and give free rein to it, to pull it out into the open and let it bask in the rays of the sun so it might ripen to its full potential.

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