The Colors of Infamy (2 page)

It was not this sort of ideal woman, but a young girl, barely
seventeen, who appeared at his side and said in a timid, almost plaintive
tone:

“May I please sit with you?”

Ossama recognized the voice and he turned to look at the girl who
was standing in front of him, slender and fragile in her short cotton print
dress and her cheap jewelry gleaming in the sun. For a moment he was seized with
panic; the girl's intrusion was going to jeopardize his plans and lead him into
a pointless, poignant conversation detrimental to his optimism. But very soon he
smiled and said, with the ill humor of a lover annoyed by his lady friend's
willful obtuseness:

“Of course, Safira, you can sit down. Why all the formality?
Really, you make me sad.”

“I don't want to bother you.”

“You never bother me. By Allah, don't you know that?”

Th
e girl sat down, her eyes suddenly
lit by a glimmer of gratitude. It was obvious that coming across Ossama was a
joy for her — perhaps her only joy.
Th
e pallor that
could be seen through her lightly made-up face betrayed how ill-nourished she
was and the hardship of her charmless existence.
Th
is face expressed the pain of immutable poverty, but, even more so,
resignation and shame, and it was not at all attractive to Ossama; still, he was
always compassionate and friendly with the girl. Aware that she was hatching
some romantic scheme that concerned him personally, he was trying to protect
himself by pretending to be corrupt and without a future.

“It's unbelievable!” Safira suddenly exclaimed, as if she were in
raptures over some miracle. “When I went out today, I was sure I was going to
run into you. Isn't that amazing?”

“I'm as delighted as you are,” Ossama answered, suspecting that
the girl had traveled the entire city to find him. “Believe me, I bless the good
fortune that set me on your path.”

By adopting this exaggeratedly warm tone, Ossama was simply hoping
to establish an affectionate mood of honest camaraderie. Unfortunately, this
mischievous cordiality, despite its excess, contributed to encouraging Safira's
modest quest for requited love. She lived in the Shoubra district with her
mother in a rear basement apartment, in total isolation and poverty. To obtain
the few piasters needed daily to sustain them in the chaos, Safira had nothing
but the sole means offered to the proletariat living under governments that
starve their people: she could continue seeking work that did not exist and die
of malnutrition, or she could become a cut-rate prostitute — Safira was still
too naïve to appreciate her body's true worth. Ossama had slept with her on the
evening they met, and in exchange she had asked for a sum so modest that this
lack of venality in a prostitute had surprised and embarrassed him. Sexual
relations that were all but free surely had to be hiding a trap; from then on he
had refrained from renewing that episode of distraction, yet without denying the
girl his friendship. She seemed to have attached herself to him like a drowning
girl to a wisp of straw — Ossama considered himself in these cases even slighter
than a wisp of straw — perhaps because she saw him as an outcast as unhappy as
she.
Th
e young man had told her he was a thief and
therefore, in his way, a pariah living on the fringes of society and this — in
her ignorant mind — seemed the essential ingredient of a love affair.
Th
e fact that she was so easily resigned irritated
Ossama and had a devastating effect on his spirits. So much bitterness, so much
criticism had accumulated in her gaze that she stifled any desire he had to
laugh. In truth, his compassion for the girl prevented him from viewing her
through his usual prism of ridicule and condemned him to seeing a reality whose
tragic aspect he normally actively denied. At times she would give herself over
to the eagerness and teasing of girls her age; then, suddenly, she would become
fierce, almost frantic, as if the crude images of her life suddenly loomed out
of her memory in their basest details, casting a cloud over any brief moment of
youthful enthusiasm.

All the while praising the girl's attire, Ossama never took his
eyes off the club's entrance in the hope that his day would not end in emptiness
and melancholy.
Th
is did not escape Safira, who
started to get up, and, in a humble tone colored with suffering, said:

“You seem to be waiting for someone, so I'll be going. Perhaps
I'll have the good fortune to see you again.”

“On your mother's life, stay put. I'm not waiting for anyone.”

“Speaking of my mother, I should mention she's very fond of you.
Yesterday she told me she was praying to Allah for you to stay safe and never be
arrested. Don't you think that's very kind of her?”

“Indeed! You mentioned me to your mother?”

“When she asked me where I had gotten these beautiful shoes” —
Safira stretched out her legs and in the shade of the alley a magnificent pair
of patent leather shoes with silver-colored metal buckles sparkled — “I couldn't
help confessing that you'd given them to me. You're not mad at me, are you?”

“And you confessed that I was a thief, too?”

“Don't be angry. You know, with the life she's been leading since
my father died, my mother's gone a bit crazy. She can't tell one job from
another. I could just as well have said you were a banker; it's all the same to
her.”

“May Allah protect us! So why
didn't
you tell her I was a banker?” Ossama asked in a calm, though slightly
irritated voice.

“I don't know,” Safira moaned, giving the impression she was
holding back tears. “Maybe because I'm proud of you. You're the only thief I
know.”

Ossama didn't bother to ask how many bankers she knew because he
was well aware of the girl's capacity for avoiding the obvious.
Th
e poor thing was going to lead him straight to the
gallows if he didn't quickly find a way to counteract his error in having
revealed his line of work to her. Once again, compassion lay behind this
unfortunate story; he had bought her the shoes the day she showed up in a
tattered pair of espadrilles, touching his heart, and he had done so with the
perverse idea that a pair of alluring shoes would allow Safira, in exchange for
her amorous dealings, to ask for a sum of money equal to her refinement. He now
regretted this over-generous act — he had expected some gratitude, not a threat
to his career. Soon, thanks to this love-struck scatterbrain, the entire police
force of the capital would be in on his act. Dressing elegantly to feign
respectability would no longer be of any use to him if he didn't manage to nip
this bad publicity in the bud. Of course these bitter thoughts lasted only the
span of a few sighs and in no way altered his conviction that nothing on this
earth is tragic for an intelligent man. With his tolerant and joyful ethics, he
was hardly predisposed to spite and he had to laugh at himself for thinking that
telling the girl he was a thief would turn her away from him. Instead of
alienating her, confiding in Safira had only made him more esteemed in her eyes,
convinced as she was — no doubt by the example of the very wealthy characters
popularized in the papers — that the profession of thief was synonymous with an
elevated social standing. She followed Ossama ceaselessly, accumulating
so-called “chance” encounters and giving him slyly languorous glances. Ossama
had to admit that, for an expert in feminine ways, he had gone pathetically
astray: any imbecile knew that women in love were impervious to all moral
considerations. For a moment he silently made fun of himself, an ironic smile
playing on his lips.

Safira could only interpret this smile as implicit criticism, and
she tried to absolve herself by saying in a faintly trembling voice:

“I may have made a terrible mistake. Forgive me.”

“No, there's nothing terrible about it. Don't worry about me. At
heart, your mother seems a very sensible person. Please thank her for her
prayers. Who knows, I might need them.”

“Do you seriously mean that?”

“A person who makes no distinction between a banker and a thief
cannot be classified as crazy. In fact, for evaluating mental health it's the
only criterion.
Th
ere are no others.”

Ossama failed to divulge to the girl that this criterion was of
his own devising. Even though Safira believed everything he told her, evaluating
madness according to such a simplistic standard seemed insufficient for judging
her mother's mental state. “Are you sure?” she asked nervously.

“On my honor!” Ossama swore, placing his hand over his heart to
prove the sincerity of his diagnosis.

“
Th
at makes me happy. I was afraid of
seeing her go completely mad. You have warmed my heart.”

He could make out real relief on the girl's face; a yearning to
teach this exemplary neophyte his conception of the world welled up in him. But
the impulse did not last long. Popularizing such a subversive concept for the
benefit of a creature as hopeless as Safira seemed like offering pearls to a
dying old woman.

“Tell me,” he began again in an amusing, conversational tone, “do
you speak with your mother often?”

Ossama wanted primarily to keep the dialogue going and not give his
companion the impression that she bored him. To be honest, the girl's problems
fascinated him against his will, as if all the injustices from which she
suffered — all that she had inherited from her ancestors since the beginning of
time — had their roots in distant lands and not in his immediate surroundings.
Since he had ascended to thief heaven, he no longer paid any attention to the
plaintive songs or moans of a fatalistic people who continued to believe in a
mythic heavenly paradise. As he listened to Safira, he could hear the faded but
enduring echo of the past when he, too, had been suffering in a world of
triumphant falsehood. Although he couldn't admit it to himself, he was hoping to
hear her complain and lament, thereby opening his heart to the lost paths of his
childhood with its trail of misfortune and cruelty — everything that in his
new-found wisdom he had relegated to the ranks of insignificance.
Th
is vague nostalgic longing, however, did not
distract him from his main purpose, which was to keep an eye on the club
entrance, which waves of passersby sporadically blocked from his view. Until now
he had only caught sight of servants in uniforms coming out one at a time to
inhale the sweltering air of the street and cast reproachful glances at the
never-ending stream of people strolling lazily beneath the sun, excluded from
the club. No doubt the club members — the notables themselves — were in the
process of whetting their appetites by swilling their alcohol of preference
while fomenting new, shady deals. But lunchtime was drawing near and Ossama knew
that none of these bastards would miss a meal; filling their bellies was the
only work to which they devoted themselves with competence and honesty.

“Yes, I speak with my mother, but not often. It pains me to see
her get all confused when we talk. I wind up feeling dizzy.”

“What do you talk about?”

Safira hesitated a moment before answering. She looked at Ossama
with atypical boldness and said, in an almost sardonic tone of voice:

“Well, just what is it that poor people talk about, in your
opinion?”

It was a low blow, a perfidious move on the girl's part, and
Ossama was momentarily mortified by his tactlessness. He was sure that the two
women could only talk about money — or more specifically, the lack of money —
and he decided to change this thorny subject quickly by making a little
joke.

“I know that poor people only talk about money, but talking about
money never made anybody any richer.”

And he emitted a pleasant and contagious little laugh to encourage
the girl to follow him down the path of cheerfulness.

But Safira stubbornly refused to laugh; on the contrary, Ossama's
unfortunate joke only succeeded in making her more despondent in regard to the
young man's feelings about poverty.

“I don't care about money,” she said. “What good is money if
there's not a little love in life?”

She lowered her eyes and stayed completely still with an
expression of dread on her face, as if she were expecting an earthquake. Ossama
didn't fall for it; he could easily see her message and he had to pretend it
wasn't directed his way. Feminine wiles, even in this girl who had barely
reached puberty, always amused him because they were such a fragile weapon, at
best good for confusing the gullible or the idiotic. Still, he was touched by
this frustrated admission and he grabbed hold of the girl's hand in a gesture of
friendship and consolation. Yet once more the compassion he felt for his
companion seemed like a defect that would destroy his freedom.

“Do you speak about love with your mother?”

“Who else can I speak to? She's the only one in whom I can
confide. At least
she
listens to me.”

Ossama admired Safira's ruse: criticizing him without naming him,
all the while knowing he would recognize himself in this allusion to his
indifference. Posing as an innocent victim, she was using her female cunning to
reach her goal, which was to snare him in the web of a pitiable love affair. But
how could he be angry at her for this? It was nothing but idle talk, with no
long-term consequences. He was lenient with Safira and her insinuations, because
this stubborn, lovelorn girl was so very young, and her wiles so absolutely
ineffective. What he would never have tolerated from an adult woman, he easily
accepted from this girl who was experimenting, at his expense, with all the
folly and uncertainties that eminent psychologists attribute to the feminine
mystique. But since Ossama had never discerned the slightest mystery in any
woman, poor Safira's wiles rarely perplexed him; he felt only a vague pity for
universal stupidity.