JUAN GOYTISOLO
67
their poverty with remarkable dignity: beggars are rare and the majority
of families who invited me into their pantheon houses reproachfully re–
jected my clumsy attempts to thank them for their welcoming glass of
tea by leaving them a note. When I later got to know Ahmed and his
family, the generosity with which he responded to my presents showed
me the lengths to which the pride and nobility of a modest family of
Nubians would go . My final evenings with them touched me to the
quick, bowled me over:
all
my preconceptions about life in the cemetery
were swept aside. If, as Jean Genet wrote,
la solitude des morts est notre
gloire la plus certaine,
the solitude the inhabitants of the macabre shared
with them endowed my hosts with supreme moral beauty: their love for
their neighbor glowed without expecting anything in return, as if
awareness of the absolute equality of men before death had abolished
with its elementary simplicity the loathsome barriers of power and
money.
Will you ever return to Cairo? I mutter on the flight back, after
noting that God the Father is enjoying a siesta with his cherubim on the
eiderdown of clouds. When, how, why?
To be present as the monster ever devours itself, as it implacably
gulps down its children? To spy on the final hecatomb, the violent ex–
plosion of its entrails? To applaud the burning of the palaces of the
great? To be an impotent witness to the harsh survival of a people? To
sink into a Louis XXVI armchair and watch the latest television creation?
At any rate, to keep my promise to Ahmed. To get a taxi on
leaving the airport and ask the driver to take me to Al Khalifa. A
bedroom, a patio, a garden: my familiar, hospitable pantheon in the City
of the Dead.
Translated from the Spanish
by
Peter Bush
