Cossery l’Egyptian/Castro el Lider Maximo

Le Monde, 24.06.08, carried an obituary of a novelist, Albert Cossery, aged 94, living in Paris, as he had done for 50 years, in a student’s single room in the Hotel Louisiana.

The report began:

“Just a few days ago, you would bump into him in the streets of the quartier de Saint-Germain-des Pres.

“Silhouette thinner and thinner, gait slower and slower, but always dressed like a gentleman, coloured kerchief in jacket top-pocket, head held up, with a roguish eye … often on the arm of a young friend, a blond.

“… He did nothing but think, dream, observe, have a siesta, and saunter in the streets. To be alive was enjoyment enough, his silence sufficed him, he was happy.

“Someone asked him one day if he wasn’t bored with own company. Since he could still speak, he responded: ‘I couldn’t be bored, I’m with Monsieur Cossery’.”

In Cairo he had been educated by the schools of the Christian brothers and in love with classical French literature; he arrived in Paris after the war, and never left.

He lived it up a lot, dancing and hanging out at the Tabou and at the Montana with Albert Camus, Boris Vian, Juliette Greco or Henry Miller, accompanied by his wife, the actress Monique Chaumette, escaping from filming with Jean Vilar’s TNP.

He was proud of being a writer. “Look at these hands, they have not worked for the past two thousand years,” he’d say, a courteous reference to ancient Egypt.

He wrote a book of stories and seven novels, the masterpiece being Mendiants et orgueilleux, Proud Beggars — in which a homosexual policeman investigates the murder of a brothel servant by a fifty-year-old professor; made into a film with an Arab cast and director in 1991.

But in each the writer never left the near Orient which forged his wisdom. He gave a voice to the wisdom shared by all those on the edge in the gutters of the East, penniless vagabonds and visionaries, hash sellers or amputees, beggars, outcasts, layabouts and wiseguys.

To continue catching up with last week’s le Monde, a comment piece (23.06.08), more in sorrow than in anger, one hopes.

“The return of Fidel Castro, after one had almost forgotten him, in a strange Adidas tracksuit, white top, orange neck, blue-banded epaulettes.

“The press talks of his ‘célèbre survêtement’, and this expression alone suffices to signal the scale of his fall: formerly, one celebrated the strength and length of his speeches; today, one scans his odd appearance. He resembles a startled owl. Cheeks sunken, lips half-open, deep facial creases, grizzled grey hair, and struggling.”

” … He stated for the press, of which, for a laugh we quote: “I have lot to say, but that is enough fortoday. I do not want to impose, simply I am alive and I think.”

“This is beautiful, it is strong. to understand all this, it is enough to try to take again these sentences on his account without bursting out laughing.

“In reappearing in this way, Castro is politicking without measure such that his image betrays him: the image of an old leader worn out to the point of looking like a scarecrow for sparrows.

“Castro, cultivated dictator, should have followed the example of Caesar.”

We are then reminded that recently a marble bust was pulled from the Rhone which archaeologists are convinced was sculpted from life.

“Truly, [the bust] seems to look at us … you are frozen, judged by a sovereign.

“… And it is thus that the dead are sometimes are very alive, and the alive very dead.

” … And Francoise Sagan, with her smiling sadness, makes us forget all the years gone by and the time lost.

“With her, we are always in the middle of reading the opening of her first book. Her masterpiece. The taste of life and death in struggle.”

Footnote: The picture above reminded me of my father when fatally ill with cancer.

However, the Guardian reported last week:

Cuba has approved what is believed to be the world’s first registered lung cancer vaccine and is offering it to Cuban and foreign patients in its hospitals.

The therapeutic vaccine CimaVax EGF extends life with few side effects… It has been shown to boost survival rates by an average of four to five months, and in some cases much longer. It does not prevent lung cancer.