The Influence Peddlers

  The Influence Peddlers

  The Influence Peddlers

  HÉDI KADDOUR

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

  BY TERESA LAVENDER FAGAN

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Yale University. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

  Originally published as Les Prépondérants. © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2015.

  All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934301

  ISBN 978-0-300-22288-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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  CONTENTS

  PART I. THE SHOCK: NAHBÈS, NORTH AFRICA, THE EARLY 1920S

  1. A Tree in the Wind

  2. The Betrayal

  3. Honored Guests

  4. And . . . Action!

  5. A Quintal and a Half

  6. The Old Woman and the Eggs

  7. The Cow of Satan

  8. A Sort of Tacit Agreement

  9. At a Nice School

  10. A Well-Planned Marriage

  11. The Story of the Ice

  12. A Lovely Summer

  13. An Eye on Everything

  14. Two Hatreds

  15. At the Market

  16. A Smiling Wife

  17. Troubled Times

  18. Big Problems

  PART II. THE GREAT VOYAGE: WINTER 1922–SPRING 1923

  19. The Jugurtha

  20. Nights of Dreams

  21. The Hand

  22. Crossroads of Pain

  23. Brother and Sister

  24. A Night at Gabrielle’s

  25. A Taste for Wealth

  26. Great Murmurings

  27. A Liberated Country

  28. The Suitor

  29. Kinder des Vaterlands

  30. For an Orchard

  31. In an Occupied Country

  32. The Smile on a Grilled Sheep’s Head

  33. Otto

  34. Fascination

  35. The Return

  PART III. ONE YEAR LATER: NAHBÈS, JUNE 1924

  36. A True Fox

  37. Scaradère

  38. A Mass Uprising

  39. The Prépondérants

  40. The Storm

  41. The Hunt

  42. An Edifying Spectacle

  43. The Face

  44. Ganthier’s Party

  45. The Blaster

  46. The Barley Wind

  47. Equal Pay for Equal Work

  48. A Complex Operation

  49. Beasts from Hell

  Glossary

  The Influence Peddlers

  Part I

  THE SHOCK: NAHBÈS, NORTH AFRICA, THE EARLY 1920S

  1

  A TREE IN THE WIND

  She read more books in Arabic than in French. This had reassured her father, but he came to realize that some Arabic books were just as dangerous. Her name was Rania, twenty-three years old, statuesque, almond-shaped eyes. She was the daughter of Si Mabrouk, Mabrouk Belmejdoub, an important figure in the capital, a former minister of the sovereign. She was a widow. Her husband had died when she was nineteen. He was handsome; they adored each other. He also loved to read, and since he also loved fighting in the army, he had died in a shell attack in Champagne.

  She had returned to live in her father’s house, and he would sometimes say, “We have both lost our other half.” After a year, he began to look for another husband for her. She didn’t refuse the suitors—“If you want me to marry that idiot, I will obey”—and it was the father who found himself on the verge of tears because his daughter would add, “It will be like . . . a tomb before I die.” The imbecile was shown the door.

  When other men came to call, she was quick to describe them: one was violent, another toothless, yet another dirty or a gold digger. She didn’t elaborate. But she reassured her father, she would one day find a good husband. He was worried because in a way she was handicapped—she was taller than the average man, she could hold a man’s gaze, she had the carriage of a woman who, from an early age, had been made to carry a basket on her head. No one had forced her to carry a basket; she wanted to do what the servants did.

  To encourage her not to be so difficult, her old servant had one day recited a saying: “An apple that stays on the ground is soon covered with worms.” She responded that she wasn’t a piece of fruit. As for books, she discussed them with her father as she had done with her husband, and she didn’t intend to become the wife of someone who expected her to give that up.

  Rania’s older brother, Taïeb, also encouraged her to remarry. He was married to a woman whose family was even more powerful than theirs and who forced him to toe the line. “His marriage is a mess,” said Rania, “so of course mine has to be worse.” Her father sided with her, but he didn’t forget that one day Taïeb would inherit his authority.

  In the middle of the winter of 1920, her uncle Abdesslam, who had a farm on the outskirts of Nahbès, a city in the south, had asked Rania to come run his household: his wife was ill, bedridden. Rania had agreed, and Si Mabrouk granted his permission, relieved to see her put some distance for a time between herself and the scene of her unhappiness, as well as the pressure from Taïeb and from certain female friends whose husbands were increasingly hostile to the protectorate that France had imposed on the country.

  Rania loved the farm. She had gone there often, as soon as she was old enough to walk. She enjoyed the open countryside; she planted bushes, herded goats, dug irrigation ditches, cut barley with a sickle. For a long time she spent her days in a big fig tree that had a tree house and a swing, until the day her aunt had decided that it wasn’t proper anymore. She replaced her home in the tree with journeys through the fields and knew every corner of the property’s twenty-two hundred acres. Eventually she was forbidden to wander off without dressing in a decent and pious manner and had to be accompanied by two female servants.

  She hadn’t returned to the farm since her marriage. Her uncle came to get her at the Nahbès train station. She walked around the car: “Is it a Renault?”

  “Are you interested in such things?” her uncle asked.

  “A widow can be interested in decent things.”

  “It’s decent for a man, not for a woman.”

  “Maybe a car will be just the thing to get me to marry again.”

  She was impertinent! The uncle said to himself that perhaps it was best to send her back, but he didn’t want to upset his brother. He would wait.

  She had kissed her aunt, asked her uncle the name of the doctor who was taking care of her.

  “It’s Doctor Pagnon.”

  “He’s a butcher!”
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  “He says she’s doing better.”

  “Is Berthommier still around? Send for him.” It was an order.

  Doctor Berthommier, looking serious, had prescribed sedatives for the pain. Rania continued to give orders. She had taken control of the household.

  “You can take care of everything around the house, like my wife did,” Abdesslam had said. “I’ll take care of the fields, the livestock, and the sales.”

  She had quickly understood that his wife had also taken care of the fields, the livestock, and the sales and that she was feared much more than her husband was. Here, too, the young widow had become indispensable. No one could work with numbers the way she could.

  And while she oversaw the entire operation, her uncle could continue to focus on what was essential: meetings with intellectuals, and also drinkers, meetings he held at his home twice a week, a mixed group of men who were themselves mixed cocktails: conservatives imbued with a wish for reforms, rationalists who began to seek out marabouts as soon as their diabetes started acting up. “Risalat al-tawhid,” Rania had said one morning while putting away the books that had remained in the sitting room along with the bottles. In response to the wary look her uncle gave her, she had replied, “Well, isn’t that what’s written on the cover?”

  The uncle wasn’t duped—she knew what she was holding in her hand: “The Letter on Unicity,” by Muhammad ‘Abduh, who proclaimed himself an atheist . . . He felt dizzy. He had his niece open her trunks and found Egyptian novels about the liberation of women . . . the Hachette series of great writers, Rousseau, Hugo . . . and even The Course on Positive Philosophy! His niece wanted to know more than men, which wasn’t good for her or the family. He decided to call his brother.

  “It’s too late,” Si Mabrouk told him. “Do you want me to forbid her to read? To beat her? Lock her up? I wanted a wonderful daughter, she grew up . . . How is your wife?” The conversation went on for a long time and ended on a cold note.

  The uncle had told his wife that Rania was packing her bags and returning to the capital. The aunt didn’t say a thing; a woman obeys. But the look she gave him was enough to throw her husband off-balance: the veil of death. A man is helpless against the look of death through the eyes of a wife. You constantly threaten them with it, and then there it is, rustling the folds of its shroud behind their slightest act of submission.

  What was most difficult was getting Rania to agree to stay.

  “My father will not be happy to know that I’m being treated like a piece of luggage!”

  Finally the uncle said, “I’m not forcing you . . . it’s for her.”

  “For whom?”

  “For her and . . . for all of us.”

  Rania had agreed, and left the sitting room, gathering up on the way the works of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, another dangerous reformer, and Unnecessary Necessity by the poet al-Ma‘arri.

  “Tell your friends I’ll return them.” She never did.

  Four months later, there had been a more serious incident. Her uncle had found her with a newspaper, not a French newspaper with nice photos and advertisements, but a nationalist newspaper in Arabic that attacked France, demanded a constitution for the country, and sang no praises of the sovereign or his ministers. He shouted. She didn’t answer, just took off her round, tortoise-shell glasses, put away the newspaper before he could take it, and modestly started to take her leave. But her uncle asked her questions, about the newspaper, the world; she answered, her hands on her knees, responses in a hesitant voice, broken words, scattered ideas, all that he expected to find in the head of a woman. But when all of that was put into good order, her words became strong statements, dangerous ideas. She knew a lot of things, and knew how to hide them. She fell silent after speaking a few more words, and he was forced to ask question after question. He argued against what she said, and she said he was right, she hadn’t seen things that way, France was stronger, no, she didn’t really know what the word nation meant; Abdesslam was sure she was lying. She mentioned another idea, the rights of the people . . . And Abdesslam’s voice rose higher and higher even as he realized that what she was saying greatly resembled the remorse that once he could have had.

  On questions of religion she remained measured, but he sensed that she was aware of everything, the visit he had made to the mausoleum of Sidi Brahim, the most famous marabout in the region. He had wanted to be discreet, perform a nocturnal sacrifice, but was a bit ashamed. Except, of course, he had brought the only red rooster in the area that would start crowing in the middle of the night, an unstoppable crowing, bringing everyone to their windows, until his knife had restored silence. She knew everything he was doing, and that he was doing everything to save his wife, sacrificing a rooster and worshipping under a tree where tiny pieces of fabric were hung. She said things only indirectly: “Some scholars think that . . .” But her uncle knew that it was exactly what she was thinking, that the cult of the saints, especially for someone who read “A Treatise on the Oneness of God,” was fetishism, contemptible. And she never mentioned the bottles in the sitting room.

  At the end of the first year the aunt had died; then, a few weeks later, so did the uncle, who had stopped eating. Before he passed away he said to Rania, “Be careful . . .” The farm went to Si Mabrouk, who decided to sell it and have his daughter return home. She had asked to stay, since the farm was doing well. She liked her life there, with space all around and orders to give. Si Mabrouk had refused. She had used delaying tactics. He had come from the capital along with Taïeb. Her voice had shaken when she talked about what she was leaving behind. The father and son had shouted, louder and louder. And she had won.

  She had continued to live on the land. Si Mabrouk had the Renault taken away when he learned that she was driving it.

  “But it’s just in circles around the house.”

  “If you continue no one will respect you anymore!”

  She had a horse-drawn carriage sent from the capital to get to town and a one-horse cart for the countryside, a lovely cart, light but solid, easily maneuvered over the rough ground, the stones, the roots, the mud, everything, with good suspension, hitched to a large, dappled gray horse. She had chosen an old servant to drive her; he was called Ali the Vulture because of his neck and his nose. He held the reins, but in fact it was she who was in charge, seated next to him, moving her head to indicate the direction in which the servant should go. She went all over the property, and when she arrived at a site where peasants were working, she stayed in the cart, at a distance, in a place from which she had a good view of the site. She would sometimes be distracted by the flight of starlings or kestrels while Ali the Vulture gave orders that the peasants acknowledged while turning their faces toward the cart. She sometimes also joined the group, picking up a clot of dirt, breaking it up, or a piece of wheat that she crushed in her palm, and everyone waited for her decision. Her hands, with nails that were often broken, were long and slender.

  She would come by early in the morning to get things started. She would come at the break, under the clear sky at midday. She brought not bread and oil like other owners but mutton tagine, tomatoes, fruit. And those who blessed her did so only once because she said that bosses who had themselves blessed were only pagans and those blessing them were hypocrites. No one dared thwart what they sensed she wanted: work done well, on time, without quarrels or indolence. The cart was red; she could be seen at a distance.

  She would return at the end of the afternoon to take stock. That woman has the eye of a master, the peasants would say, an eye that fattens the livestock. When returning to the farm she liked to get out of the cart and walk alone in front of it, listening to the living sounds around her, letting the air play on her face, walking with the sensation of being in front of herself, saying to herself: They need to take the stones out of this field, they aren’t careful, you leave the land alone and it brings back its stones, imperceptibly, and because it is imperceptible no one does anything, must tell them not
to delay . . .

  The last rays of the sun cast a soft light onto the large, green fruit of the cactus that bordered a field; in the sky where the blue was beginning to darken there was a single, small cloud . . . My thoughts can reach as far as that cloud . . . “Here,” her husband had written to her during the war, “we have gray clouds for rain and yellow clouds for death.” . . . Rania walked along another field, breathed the air that traveled from the sea in gusts of wind . . . the wind is the companion of widows . . . her eyes rested on the rapeseed, her uncle had wanted rapeseed to please the French, it was idiotic, rapeseed in a land of palm and olive trees, not idiotic for them, the colony must produce for the homeland, they said, idiotic even so, but she kept the rapeseed, for the cows, because she liked the great yellow burst of its flowers, and because a Frenchman who had once come to her uncle’s house had said to her, pointing to a field in flower, “It begins here, and week after week the yellow will invade Italy, then France, Germany, Poland, Russia, as far as the Urals, the great voyage of rapeseed,” . . . she went across the field, looked in the distance, toward the white cupola of a marabout that marked the northern border of the property, she also walked through the wild grass . . . Ahdath al-yaoum mithla l’hacha’ich . . . the events of the day are like wild grass . . . My life no longer has wild grass . . . I live in two prisons, the second is the walls of my heart, to make wild grass in one’s heart . . . I wrote him a letter and everything is in his hand, with my tears . . . I didn’t send that letter . . . I burned it, I was like a leaf before the flame, shrinking . . . I must hide it . . . Love that is shown is in danger.

  She scolded herself, stopped dreaming, continued walking, between dreams and thoughts. When a little rain began to fall, she stopped, looking above the reddish edges of the wadi, and saw a rainbow appear: the peasants called that ‘ars addib, the jackal’s wedding feast.

  She ended up contracting the illness of rich farmers, a hunger for the earth, and she chided herself for letting a parcel of two hundred acres to the north of the property escape her. A colonist, the largest landowner in the region, Ganthier, had grabbed it up; he had bought it from another colonist who had left the country to grow old on the Côte d’Azur. She had asked her father to make an offer, but Ganthier had won. The colonist had confided in Ganthier: “Mabrouk Belmejdoub, the former minister, offered me more, but I was advised to sell it to you—it seems the French need to support each other, even in business!”