JUAN GOYTISOLO
55
reflects the frenetic growth of a city that in ten years has gone from seven
to fourteen million souls. Meanwhile the excavations for the un–
derground railway have opened up the monster's entrails, generating
fractured drains and mephitic floods, intensifYing the general, irremediable
confusion. In the center drivers attack the crossroads like fairground
dodge-'em cars. A tanned, weasel-faced policeman waves his puppet arms
to no avail, tries to halt a powerful Mercedes that drives right around
him transforming his frustrated attempt at interception into a tardy, re–
luctant gesture of authorization. My taxi has stopped next to him and I
observe at leisure his threadbare uniform and bulging crotch, his would–
be air of authority, the cynical expression of an impotent ruler over
chaos. The human bunches hanging from the carriages of the Helwan
train have crashed into those coming from the opposite direction: six
dead! Not a single building in Cairo has fallen down this week though
fifty
percent of them are in a state of ruin. But the city is still not Cal–
cutta, the rats have not
yet
invaded the houses, beggars and cripples do
not
yet
display their horrible stumps in hotel entrances, nor are they
whipped out of sight by uniformed porters, the people are not
yet
dying
on the sidewalks, walking skeletons do not
yet
proffer their lifeless hands
or force the foreigner afraid of treading on them to jump to one side.
My arrival at the hotel where
I
am to stay was merely an interlude in this
initial vision of
AI
Qahira - literally,
The Victorious
-
into whose omniv–
orous, emetic belly,
I
shall stride minutes later. The city that absorbs me is
the ubiquitous, unleashed monster described by Edward Jarret in his ex–
cellent novel. For a few hours my gaze will be that of the old man
sheltering on the traffic island: the disillusioned lucidity of someone who
knows his sentence and is calculating the time left before he is blotted
out.
In those ineffable Egyptian television serials, destined to stifle and
dull the intelligence and sensitivity of Arab peoples, the directors carefully
fashion the ideal ambience in which the plot will unravel: enormous
apartments, modern offices and shops, peaceful gardens and walks the si–
lence of which will be broken at most by whispering couples or sooth–
ing bird trills. Ordinary people have been unceremoniously expelled from
those empty, hermetic spaces. Nothing indicates the proliferating human
warren of the city: just shots of a deceptively clean river, private parks,
avenues as bourgeois and exquisite as the characters' cars and houses. A
utopia, drug, fantasy, a need to compensate for the cramped, promiscu–
ous life of millions of people condemned to overcrowding in their lives
as well as in the street? Do these women, men, children, old people who
buy, sell, beg, work, eat and sleep on packed pavements nourish their
dreams of a better life on the vision of those spacious rooms with showy
