Beer in the Snooker Club

by Waguih Ghali

I would not like to go to prison, but I’d like to have been.

It is strange. A man gets to know a woman. For a long time they are one. They have mingled their thoughts, their bodies, their hopes, their odours, their lives. They are one. And then a while later they are strangers. They are not one any more. Just as though it had never happened, as though looking at oneself in the mirror and seeing a stranger instead of one’s reflection.

Artists try to depict people; and people depict the artists’ conception of people.

If it didn’t turn in that direction soon, I was going to steer it that way myself because they are never so happy as when beating the bush in London.

He teaches Arabic now to adult Egyptians who have suddenly been faced with the necessity of knowing that language,

I was afraid she would imagine I was feeling sorry for her because of the wound. I was feeling sorry, but that had nothing to do with my desire to hold her hand. I loved her.

To be loved by, and to possess the person we love is why we were born.

I was neither Red, Pink, Blue, nor Black. I had no politics in me then. I didn’t consider the Egyptian revolution and getting rid of Farouk to be politics.

Politics or no politics, that was too much for me. I don’t remember what happened exactly; we came to blows and I told him to ‘wipe his backside’ with his American democracy. Of course my mother started crying, and the servants separated us, and even calling the police was suggested.

The only important thing which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution. We took to it wholeheartedly and naturally, without any fanaticism or object in view.

Gradually, we began to see ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians.

I started to pour some of my passion into politics. I later learnt that a man who has passion in his politics is usually attractive to women.

‘A little bit.’ It was that calm sadness which … well, which comes over you if you are combing the hair of the woman you love and if you don’t feel good enough for her.

I wanted to live. I read and read and Edna spoke and I wanted to live. I wanted to have affairs with countesses and to fall in love with a barmaid and to be a gigolo and to be a political leader and to win at Monte Carlo and to be down-and-out in London and to be an artist and to be elegant and also to be in rags.

She never told me she loved me, and if she had, I would not have believed her.

The mental sophistication of Europe has killed something good and natural in us, killed it for good … for ever.

Gradually, I have lost my natural self. I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of the imagination; my own actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play. Both audience and participant in one – a fictitious character.

A woman will never fall in love with a man who does not dominate her, however slightly.

She didn’t hesitate: ‘I drink to anyone who deals imperialism a blow.’

When he wants a new market for his adulterated goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary, the Englishman flies to arms in defence of Christianity, fights for it, conquers for it, and takes the market as a reward from heaven.

‘You’d be surprised,’ I said. I could see myself being nasty. It was a new thing to me. To be naturally angry was not new; but to be deliberately nasty was a new sensation.

I didn’t answer. She took her comb out of her handbag and gave it to me. To comb her hair was becoming a sexual fetish between us.

It was strange, to me, that being nasty had paid a reward. She loved me that afternoon. Is there anything more wonderful in this world than to possess the woman you love in the afternoon and after a sleep, to bath and dress and go out hand in hand?

I suppose if a young man feels he is loved by a rich and beautiful woman, it isn’t unnatural for him to be a bit arrogant, but my arrogance was not natural. I sincerely believed that if I manifested humility and a loving gratitude to Edna, I would not be loved in return. It is all right for people to pretend that love breeds love, but it is not so. The seed of love is indifference.

Edna was being cold towards me, but I had reached that stage of insobriety which magnifies self-confidence to a degree of smugness.

I turned to Shirley and, without in the least meaning to, I whispered that she was the most attractive girl I had seen for a long time, then immediately I ignored her again. This, I thought, was the most skilful opening; awakening a woman’s interest and then ignoring her, and letting her pursue for a while, if only out of sheer curiosity.

‘What’s happening to you, Ram?’ he said. ‘You’re changing so fast I’m beginning not to recognize you.’

I drank my beer. Was I enjoying myself? The questions I was beginning to ask myself would kill me, I thought. Why couldn’t I do what I was doing without all this judging? Why couldn’t I just be what I was only a few weeks earlier in Egypt?

Then I started making love to Shirley for no reason at all, except, perhaps, for ego’s sake. Jesus, I’m even using a word like “ego”. And then I enjoyed seeing us making a fool of Steve, although in actual fact I was sorry for him and bore him no grudge whatsoever.’

If only I could be angry, I told myself, I could knock that Steve out. But I can never hit someone unless I am angry.

It had been a pleasant time, yet there was something lacking … a sense of climax. There is only one perfect ending to everything, and that is death, but there are other good endings as well.

This was the good ending. Even though we did not love each other, even if there was no lust between us, just to caress and kiss and to sleep close to one another was the final touch to end the day. And I understood how some men have to reach that fulfilment even between man and man.

‘Are you coloured?’ she asked. I looked at my hands to see whether I was coloured. Although I had read so much about this in Egypt, I had never encountered it in actual life. I had never wondered whether I was coloured or not (later I went to a library and learnt that I was white). ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

One only realizes the extent of his love when he thinks he has lost the one he loves; and unhappily, very often only begins to love when he feels his love is not returned.

Call an American ‘sir’ and he’s half in love with you.

but happiness, to me, is the freedom of two people who love each other to share their lives in circumstances permitting this love to live.

In spite of your idealism, generosity, kindness, I consider you cruel. You are cruel when you say you love me, and yet insist on living separated from me. If you didn’t love me, it would be another …’

‘I joined,’ I said, ‘because I didn’t know what to do with the knowledge I possess.’ ‘What do you mean, Ram?’ ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘this knowledge of history and politics and literature had to be channelled towards something or other if I weren’t to go mad. At first all I did – my politics, my behaviour, my infidelities – were nothing but bravado, showing off, enjoyment.

‘Edna,’ I went on, ‘when you used to leave, I used to be left with a colossal amount of knowledge and awareness of the world which I didn’t know what to do with. As long as you were with me, it had, however vaguely, something to do with my love for you. My knowledge made me a little worthy of you.’

‘if he is unconsciously insincere, he may join one of the many left-wing societies in Europe, and enjoy himself.’

‘A communist,’ I said. ‘A communist. You should ask me whether I belong to the Communist Party. The answer to which is no.’

And once again this terrible feeling of oppression and this longing to explode everything and expire with the explosion came over me.

‘This terrible knowledge I possess,’ I said. ‘All the literature I have read. You. This awareness of myself,’ I told her, ‘which started to afflict me as soon as I set foot in Europe. I see myself not only through Egyptian eyes, but through eyes which embrace the whole world in their gaze.’

‘My God,’ she said, ‘I never realized I had made you so lonely.’

‘You are intelligent enough to know I wouldn’t take someone like you seriously.’

There comes a moment, after that, when man’s passion has suddenly been completely vented, and all that remains is a detached, aloof, perhaps rather smug omnipotence. And if the man is not really

in love with the woman, she is at a terrible disadvantage. He has a sudden lingering ascendancy over someone who a little while ago was his equal.

And this omnipotence a man feels usually makes him cruel. Smug, as I said. And the crueller he is, the more helpless and defeated is his companion.