The following was translated from French by Emma Ramadan

 

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Who remembers you and who still cares for you, Abdallah? Who?

They forgot you. They buried you. They committed your suicide.

From the wire, you fell. 

They are disappointed, you fell. They look away. Such cruelty. They move on. Will they return to you one day, all those who surround him, him the great genius, the small and highly impressive man, Jean Genet? Will they return one day? Will he return one day, the man who raised you so high, so high, up where he told you to fly? Perhaps yes, perhaps no.

In the small Parisian studio he rented for you, you are alone, so alone. He almost never comes anymore. You are abandoned, wounded, disabled, at the end of your rope, at the end, what will you do? Which of yesterday’s friends have called?

You do nothing. You lie there. You stare at the ceiling. You listen to the sounds of the building. You hope. He is on his way, Jean Genet. He will knock. Who’s there? Jean, is that you?

In the circus, you flew, Abdallah. You walked in the air. On the air. You know how, have known long before him. It runs in your family. Acrobats.

You really flew. You smiled. You trembled, each time, and you smiled, you almost always smile.

You fly, Abdallah, far from everything, from everything in this narrow world.

Him, below, intransigent and silent Genet, he looks at you. He has lifted his round head towards you, suspended. He seems like a child, a harmless young boy. Surely not a famous writer who frightens people. His sad eyes are tender nonetheless. Tender for you, Abdallah? Or tender for him, towards him, him at your age and before your age?

You will fly, Abdallah. You don’t have a choice. That’s how it’s been since you met him. He loves you. He loves you. He loves you. You do what he tells you. He tells you everything. He intervenes in everything. He loves you. He directs you. He wants only what’s best for you, of course. He wants you free up there, without him, with him. You will fly. The tightrope is there before you, endless, merciless, loving. It’s the final judgment day. And God Genet will not let you go. You will have to show your elegance in the face of danger, walk through the air, through death. That’s what he wants to see. And that’s what you want to do too. You want to die. You can’t take it anymore. You’re fed up. You want to die. For all of it to be over. The trial. The judgment. And a hell begins, opens its doors, where you will wait for him.

Him: he will not die right away. He will live for a long time yet. And he will tell you that you were his greatest love and that after you, writing literature, making magic with words, has lost its meaning. Do you hear me, Abdallah? He will guilt himself to death, the great writer, he will go to Morocco and in all the faces of the beggars, thugs, and prostitutes he meets, he will search for your shadow, your trace. Your eyes. Your gestures. Your melancholy and your resistance. He will give them a lot, those poor men of Morocco, rejected by Morocco: all his money. He is generous. He acts generous. Sometimes, he has sex with them. But, just like with you, that’s not the important part. Fuck, penetrate, be penetrated, touch the hole, fill it, lick it, watch the milk come out, we can make words crack open around all of that but we don’t really need to enact it in real life. Sex doesn’t exist.

Abdallah, you understood, you are only an image. A fantasy. A double of him, the great Genet. You are only what he wants you to be. He loves you. In your heart, you know that he loves you. You know what you did to him. Seduction. Sorcery. You followed him. You followed him of your own free will. Really? You walked beside him, behind him, and you were a good student. A very good student, more than up to the task.

But that wasn’t enough.

He doesn’t love you. What a tragedy. He doesn’t love you anymore. No, you’re wrong, he adores you. He worships you. You inspire him, you are his energy, his sun, an Arab in France, a fragile and utterly luminous being for him alone.

He looks at you. You sleep together. And he writes. He writes a lot at this moment. You don’t know what he writes. For now, you’re not curious about his words. You simply want for him to be there and for him to direct you. He wants to do it, again and again and again. You force him to do it sometimes. To play the Master. You act difficult. Temperamental. Like a spoiled brat.

And, in the midst of all those bourgeois, literary Parisians that he occasionally spends time with, you are lost. You look around for him. Eventually he returns. He forgets the others: he looks at you, there is only you, only you, soon the two of you will be alone, he will tell you climb, you will climb, you will fly, that’s all you’re waiting for, to fly, fly for him, to fall, fall as you fly for him. 

And you, Abdallah?

And you, in all this, in this desire? In this project? In this dream?

Are you free? Are you emancipated?

Are you an artist?

Little circus artist, that’s what you were before him, long before destiny compelled you to meet him and submit to him.

You played the slave. He was a good master. Is that it?

You are an artist and you don’t need him, you don’t need his demands and his dictatorship and his orders and his rages and his heavy silences, you’re sick of his threats and his way of having sex and especially his eyes black with anger and sadism. He’s too old for you, Abdallah, you must leave, flee before it’s really too late.

There’s still time, Abdallah.

You will fall.

You fall.

Abdallah, Abdallah, you fall, you fall.

Thank God, nothing serious this time. Get back up, on your own, stand tall. Go give him a kiss before he sinks into a gruelling, castrating silence. Go on, go on.

He’s like your father when you fall from the wire. Go see him. Apologize. It’s in your best interest. Don’t become harsh like him, stubborn like him, eternally aggravated like him.

Go on.

But you know that he’s tired of it. You don’t listen enough. You don’t demand enough of yourself, he says. You know that he wants more more more. Always more. What more?

For how long will you carry out his orders, do everything he tells you? For how long will you be nothing without his orders?

He is the great man, the great Jean Genet. A poet and poorly raised. He sees himself in you. Perhaps he would have liked to be like you. A poor clever Arab lost in the racist France of the 1950s. A colonized man who rebels.

You are him. Abdallah. Jean. Abdallah Bentaga. Jean Genet.

Who writes for whom? Who gives energy to whom?

You are intimidated. At the beginning. All those important people who host the man of letters, the man of literature. They are all in complete awe of him, what he says, what he doesn’t say. They drink up his words, accept all of him.

You followed his instructions to the letter. You tried. You are a hero. And, one second later, the ashes of a nondescript hero. A ghost. You rehearsed, repeated in your head the mise en scène he forces on you and that you await. Each gesture, each breath. The arms. The feet. The tightrope. And the love. You learned the program, his program. And, nevertheless, you fell. Oh how you fell, Abdallah. How you fell. It’s endless, how you fell. It’s final.

You are not yet dead. You will not die from that, from that fall.

Him and the others, they are disconcerted. You are the angel Abdallah, beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful. The angel fell. The angel no longer exists. We witnessed his fall. It was climactic to see his fall. It was swift. Very swift. Jean Genet told them all about it. Through the sad words of his narrative, they experienced this small instant as an eternity. It was climactic. A climax in the proper sense. Milk came out. Sperm.

It’s over.

It’s over, Abdallah.

Love is nothing now.

Death awaits you. You and him, you both know what this is. What will happen.

You placed all his books around you. All his books. And you slit open your veins. The blood spilled so swiftly, you watch it pour out of you and touch his books, saturate his books, feed his books, feed even the words and the silence between his sentences.

You know it: he will receive the message and he too will slip into silence.

You punished him as he had punished you.

You don’t go in peace. You don’t hold it against him. And you know that he was waiting for you to make a radical gesture. Radical. Tragic. Eternal. You know that this is your masterpiece. The masterpiece he awaits from you.

Die.

Die.

Die.

That is the only true, revolutionary act.

Abdallah. Abdallah. Abdallah. With no tears, say your name with three As.

Time has passed. Oblivion envelops everything. They transformed you into a literary myth in France. What a consecration. Bravo. They sacrificed you. They stole your soul. You are no longer Abdallah.

From the start, you were condemned to death.

They call you the tightrope walker. It’s written on the cover of a book. Written by him. To you.