Mahfouz: Ties from the Antipodes

• October 18, 2011
• Article

( This article is also available in Spanish)

18.10.2011 - It was midday in the '70s when I first saw Cairo. It was a brief trip and, happily, touristic. The city impressed me more than anticipated. At least, far beyond my expectations. Because, beyond the Nile, the pyramids and the museums crowded with poorly displayed treasures, was a boisterous, dusty city, filled with twists and turns, voices, smells, plastic and flies. Just like many babbling avenues in Mexico City. The same noisiness, bustle and grime. The crowded avenues of Cairo were, unequivocally, just like Mexico. My Mexico.

A critical reflection would point out, of course, that this was my first trip to the third world. That would be correct. But only in part, because beyond the chronic lack of maintenance that characterizes poor countries, Cairo and Mexico had a similar pulse. Strangely familiar.

Cairo seemed close to me, near, dear, my own. In the half language with which I managed to communicate with the Cairenes, I discovered that behind the enormous Arab heritage in the language, the Andalusian courtyard, the fountain in the middle, just like my rambling family home in the Mexican provinces -there was a tone to human relations, more concretely to familial ones, whose codes were not only similar, but required no translation. They were my own.

I could not define the relationship of these underlying structures. I could only recognize them. Many years passed before, at the beginning of the '90s, wandering one night through a well known bookstore in Mexico City, I discovered a novel written by an Egyptian who had just won the Nobel Prize. I bought it.

It wasn't that he had won the Nobel Prize. At this point, the uneven quality of its winners was public knowledge. I was attracted, nonetheless, by the author being Egyptian and the novel about the slums in the old city center of Cairo in this century. Midaq Alley. Memories of that trip came back to me. It was precisely those alleyways plagued by children, rats and yelling, that had fascinated me. At this point, I don't think there is any need to clarify that I have always had a dark attraction for the sordid.

I read Midaq Alley. I loved it. I read it with adolescent voracity. In a single sitting, in one bite. I discovered Mahfouz, the implacable narrator, the teller of tales, the storyteller. I looked for other novels, but in those days in Mexico, no others were to be found. So I took advantage of a trip to the United States to find other titles. In a bookstore in Los Angeles, I managed to get another 11 titles. All edited by Cairo University Press.

I returned to Mexico with my suitcase loaded with novels, like a child with a new toy. Enthralled and filled with hope, I placed them on the edge of my reading couch. It was one of those periods of scant work, and the intention of adapting one of them for film never crossed my mind. It was the pleasure of reading for the pleasure of reading.

I put The Beginning and the End on the bottom. I thought - and still think - it was an awful title, therefore the one that least appealed to me. It was a long novel, a very long one that began, like the good films of old time Mexican cinema, with the death of the father. From that moment on, the lives of the four siblings - three males and one female - cross and intertwine with their bad luck and inescapable destiny.

With great mastery, Mahfouz strung together, with the stitches of a medieval embroiderer, the comings and goings of this family that, in one fell swoop, landed in poverty. Of that shame-filled middle class family that barely managed to make ends meet, that finally, falls into poverty without any modesty. From the gray apartment to the basement.

It reminded me powerfully of the family histories of the early 20th century in Mexico, when the revolution forced a readjustment of the social classes and the migration of a large part of the, until then, naïve and happy, provincial middle class to Mexico City. It had, in addition, a familiar reek of melodrama that shows its kinship with Mexican films of the forties.

And when I say reek of melodrama, I do not use the term disparagingly. Quite the contrary. Dickens and Dostoyevsky wrote melodrama, week after week, diligently and meticulously. In melodrama lie the vicissitudes of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Melodrama is the cloak that covers most of 19th-century literature, with which I at least was educated and informed as a reader.

Mahfouz also handled melodrama with mastery, entwining all of the incidents of the novel with one another, even those that, at a first glance, appear most banal. I read the novel with rapture. I locked myself in for two whole days. I stopped answering the phone. I took advantage of the fact that Ripstein - Arturo Ripstein, film director and my husband - was working from dawn to dusk those days. It was me, my couch and Mahfouz.

I advanced through it panting, enthralled, but without the least hint, yet, of the idea of adapting it to film. One of the advantages I have preserved to date is that, in spite of having made several adaptations, I still read as a reader, and not as a "fisher" for ideas and projects.

So then, I arrived almost to the end. I saved the last two chapters. Night was falling. I took the phone off the hook. There were only two chapters. The lucky brother had just discovered that his little sister, so wretched and unattractive, had prostituted herself. As a member of a traditional family, he had to protect its good name. The code of honor closed in on them like a subway arriving at a station.

I remember reading the next pages in a kind of frenzy. The brother leads the tarnished sister toward suicide, to later commit it himself. The Nile swallows both of them.

Suddenly, the novel had taken on a new breath. Unrelenting destiny closed in upon it and elevated it to the level of tragedy. So many sorrows and woes, so much maternal fretting, all that sacrifice for nothing. Two bodies floating down the Nile. Joined by a profound and incomprehensible family tie. The family, birthplace of the purest love and hatred imaginable. Of the greatest frustrations. Of the most intimate, profound and unfathomable demands.

Ripstein returned when I was two paragraphs from the end. He was burdened with a day filled with work incidents he wanted to tell me about. I chased him from the room with blows, between sobs. My heart was breaking. When I finally finished, I emerged amazed, hypnotized. Amazed because it had been years since I had cried while reading. I remember having left Wuthering Heights a wreck of sniffles and tears; but then I was 14. Then, in those yesterdays, I cried. Today, I was an adult, seasoned and buffered by life. Nonetheless, my eyes were swollen with tears.

My other amazement was due to the profound determination that took hold of me as soon as I finished the novel. I had to adapt it. I must adapt it. That doesn't happen to me. Reading and immediate adaptation is not the norm for me. Yes, I have worked on a good number of adaptations, but I have come to them along various winding paths. Never immediately after reading, with the urgent need to incorporate in my veins, in my bowels, what I had just read. 

However, that is what happened to me with The Beginning and the End.

I went into Ripstein's studio and blurted out without further ado: "If I can't adapt it, I will kill myself. We need to get the rights. If necessary, I will go to Cairo with cactus needles embedded in my knees." In view of this reaction, Ripstein hastened to read it. Fortunately, he liked it with an intensity equal to my own. But the path to the copyright is a tortuous one, especially when one is filming in countries such as ours, burdened with problems and lacking in resources.

We knew that a well known author could cost quintals. And the Nobel, in addition to prestige, had made Mahfouz suddenly popular. In a matter of two months, he went from a total unknown, to required reading for aunts and subway passengers.

A few months later, for his birthday, we gave my father-in-law, Alfredo Ripstein, Midaq Alley. Probably this choice of gift followed an unconscious strategy. Very unconscious, because at that point he had been retired for years, decades. The strategy worked.

If you watch an Egyptian film of the '40s and a Mexican one from the same period, you could mix them up: the actors, the actress's clothing, the exalted tones of black and white, the exaggerated performances and the glittering sets made with insufficient money. It was understandable that the old producer would feel caught up by that novel that was destined to remind him of so very many years.

And so, the glow of the golden era of Mexican film that resounds in Mahfouz's novel quickened the nostalgia of my father-in-law, the old producer of films of every sort. He decided to buy the rights to Midaq Alley and The Beginning and the End.

Ripstein and I were adamant. We were not interested in Midaq Alley - a magnificent novel, by the way - but The Beginning and the End, a much longer, sadder and lesser known novel. That one was ours. The one that had become embedded in our chests. 

Months later, the rights were obtained. We were lucky, very lucky, because, as in all of the Cinderella stories, chance plays a part, and a big one. Mahfouz had a weakness for Mexico, which he felt was a kindred country, a parallel country beyond the Atlantic. Both dry, both with pyramids, both with ancient cultures, both cross-bred.

That love, his generosity, and the fact that he worked for long years in the Egyptian film industry, conspired to make him sell the rights for an amount that was not burdensome. We were able to film The Beginning and the End. I plunged into adapting it. I faced the task of dealing with the almost epic dimensions and intentions of the novel. However, it was a pleasurable, easy, loving task.

I discovered, while working on it, that my first impression about Cairo was true. That the pulses of both cities were akin. That we were united by much more than what divided us. That Mexico, through its Spanish heritage, took from Egypt the alleyways of its city centers, its neglected neighborhoods, its evening bustle, its love of rooftops, its morbid penchant for steam baths, and above all, its close family structure.

The family, the universe upon which our biography is written; strung together with each one's traditions, customs, secrets, philias and phobias. Both Mexico and Egypt - I boldly assert - have been enclosed societies with governments that are more or less paternalistic, if not decidedly authoritarian, in which public dialogue has been confined to occasional café chatter and rumors. In them, the solution to the problem of society and individual men is tied up and resolved behind doors, at the family hearth: warm, suffocating, loving, stifling.

I believe - and again I am venturing a risky hypothesis - that in both, the development of the citizen took place outside our borders, beyond our seas. This is perhaps our mark of Cain. "Citizen" is a basically individual entity, responsible to his peers, not to God, the product of morality and his relationship with it, that "modern" man in the full extent of the word, secular by definition, came to Mexico, and I assume Egypt (Coetzee dixit) as an afterthought, stumblingly. In both cases, as an import.

When I say this, I in no way mean to detract importance or influence from this fact. For Mexico, the arrival of modernity and the ideas of the French Revolution meant, no more or less than independence from Spain, and a stumbling transit toward independence that would leave it sunk in a series of religious conflicts that did not end until 1939, with a concordat between the faithful and the State, after thousands and thousands had died.

We were secular for a little over a century without having digested it. Without having wanted it, without knowing what it meant. Modernity descended upon us in one fell swoop. I think a good part of our problems are due to this premature birth of independence.

I imagine - and here I apologize beforehand for my audacious presumption - that Egypt entered into contact with the modern West with the arrival of the Napoleonic hoards, and that, likewise, of a sudden and from outside, a fraction of the enlightened middle class embraced the ideas of the Encyclopedists and the French Revolution; and with them, became modernized in the midst of a society that was firmly isolated from such waves of thought.

To this friction between the archaic and the modern we owe, I again venture, the preeminence of the family. It would seem that societies are saying: I don't understand this world, and therefore I will seek refuge at home.

And for me, infinitely more evil than Mahfouz, there - at home - is where horror is found, flaunting itself behind closed doors, embodied in the family. In The Beginning and the End, this novel that had bewitched me, the family practices phagocytosis on itself.  They eat each other. And the family becomes cannibalistic because it is the agency regulating society, its individuals. It is the beginning and the end.

The family depicted by Mahfouz reminded me of my paternal family, suddenly impoverished at the beginning of the 20th century, in which, as in Mahfouz's novel, the women had to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the future of their brothers. And, as in the family in the novel, the sacrifice turned them into social pariahs, husbandless, childless, without reputation or destiny. Although family themes have always been dear to me, it wasn't until The Beginning and the End that I threw myself into them. Not couples, not mothers. The family as a whole: father, mother, brothers, sisters. Ties that bind, that protect; ties that beset.

I owe to Mahfouz, and the elements his novel provided me with, having allowed myself to delve into Mexican families, even though a mother in the Mexican city of Guadalajara told me: "I don't know what they're like where you come from" - Mexico City - "because here, we mothers love our kids very much." I didn't want to clarify that my father was born in Guadalajara. My grandmother was also a native of that city, and surely also of her same ilk.

The Beginning and the End allowed me in turn to speak of the wound of motherhood, of the Mexican mother, to be more precise, that favorite of Mexican films of the '40s. And I, mother that I am, am hugely grateful to him for this. I am grateful that he allowed me to feel my way around the bottomless pit, full of twists and turns, that is motherhood.
On another occasion, a new, somewhat idiotic, director slapped me with simplistic feminism: "All the women in the film are either dumb or whores." Clearly, the director either did not have or did not understand sexual urges, or, with an unconsciously macho viewpoint, she discredited them.

She was, without even suspecting it, a victim of that Puritanism that believes that talking about what is wrong, is wrong. Who thinks that one should not say slaves, but temporary workers. That manual laborers should be good and spirited, and women strong and independent. Any resemblance to reality should be proscribed. She lived in the empire of 'should be,' just like the heroes of socialist realism, today fortunately buried and forgotten.

Mahfouz, on the other hand, showed a predilection for complex, dual, tortured and tortuous female characters, and was little given to moral judgements. He depicted ones that, at a simplistic first glance, could be deemed whores and fools, and who, in depth, are discovered to be the survivors of their calloused world. Those who get ahead in the day to day.

Beyond these lacks of understanding and differences with my co-nationals, the adaptation of The Beginning and the End was, first and foremost, easy, quick and especially passionate. Which did not prevent it from facing countless obstacles entailed by translating one society to another. I said that we share -the Egypt-Mexico axis - the family framework, the noise at gatherings, the way we make friends. The human in humanity joins us.

That is why I get slightly indignant when people ask me in amazement, "How did you ever think of adapting an Egyptian novel? Cairo in Mexico?" they would say in disbelief. I adapted Maupassant, so very French, without anyone finding it the least bit strange; and I swear that if I were to adapt Ibsen's A Doll's House, it would be seen as natural, in spite of the fact that Norway, so Lutheran, so Nordic, so civilized, lacks any links with Mexico.

Mexico comes from deep-rooted and cherished Spanish extraction, and incorporates, without even knowing it, hundreds of Arab traditions. We eat marzipan and dates at parties, delicious enasaimada pastries, we refresh ourselves in patios with fountains and colonnades; our markets are chock-full of scents, spices, flavors. And the language, this Spanish that is so well aged, owes a huge debt to Arabic, a debt of almost 18 percent. Not for nothing, Al Andaluz was Arab for 700 years. And we are what we speak, and the origins of what we speak. Language is the greatest forge there is. And my language, Spanish, has among its mothers, Arabic.

Therefore, because of the shared ties, it irks me that people find it extraordinary that I should adapt an Egyptian. I think the only explanation lies in the encumbrances of colonial thought. You can adapt the "center," copy it, emulate it. But not a peer, another poor member of the periphery.

I would be less than truthful if I dismissed the difficulties I faced in the adaptation. That would be an act of frivolous distortion. The first difficulty I faced is more of a technical order: the novel was long, loaded with characters, incidents and reversals faithful to the tradition of the 19th-century Russian and English novels in which, I also venture, Mahfouz was steeped.

If Mahfouz had not been such a good novelist, I could have excluded outright a good part of the novel. Directly removed one of the children. I was tempted to eliminate the first born, a scoundrel and troublemaker, because, for the simple reason of living away from home, he was seemingly freer from the oppressive family structure.

But Mahfouz is a veteran teller of stories. And every storyteller knows that each act must be linked, intertwined with the rest of the plot. And The Beginning and the End is told with such mastery that if I removed a brick, a seemingly trivial episode, the whole construction would collapse. I think I recall, if memory does not play me false, that all I managed to eliminate was a noisy wedding attended by the eldest son as a singer.

But, finally, these are only technical difficulties inherent in adaptation. Novels and film are ostensibly similar, but they have different, almost opposite, grammars. You have to find a way to tell the novel in film. The greatest difficulties I found in the adaptation were in the different amorous practices. In Mexico, for at least the last two centuries, the sentimental relations of couples occur apart from the family. The family of the young marriageable woman may or may not like her candidate for husband; they may pull out their hair in fury, but in the final analysis, the parents of the bride and groom only occupy the position of witnesses to the ceremony. They can give their blessing, but never permission.

This has been so since the days of my great-grandparents, my great great grandparents and farther back. There is no dowry,  no imposition, no economic transaction whatsoever.

Therefore, it was impossible for the family to order the second brother to marry the abandoned fiancée of the favorite son, as in the novel.

I had no choice but to sexualize it: the young woman would be dishonored and with child. But more than a purely sexual seduction, it was an act of revenge: the vendetta of the protagonist against life and the part of redeemer which he had drawn in the family assignation of roles. This marriage of convenience was as alien to him as it was to me. The axis of the conflict shifted from the sphere of traditions to that of psychology. 

Gabriel, my protagonist, does not assume his role of redeemer in a joyous fashion. The mother and her love, partial and excluding, oppress him. He is a messiah not only in spite of himself, but against himself, who calls on God to free him from his mission. He is a twisted and terrified redeemer. And this vision is a departure from Mahfouz and is irreparably mine. It is a reading based on my tradition, foreign to Mahfouz's universe. Because, in addition, as I said and say again, Mahfouz is a man of much better sentiments than I. For him, the mother acts for the good of her children. There are no hidden motives, no doubts, and, therefore, no evil.

When I made the adaptation, I kept the tone of melodrama present in Mahfouz's novel; only I inverted the moral inflection of the story. I told it from the dark side of human feelings. The side of shadows, guilt, sin. It is in my nature to seek the sordid, like the scorpion in the fable.

Now then, once I decided to make the moral and sexual inversion in the plot, I faced what would prove to be the greatest challenge in the adaptation: the end of the novel. I said that the ending shook me. That was what made me cry, made me decide to adapt it, come what may.

I thought that the novel occurred in a tone of family melodrama; that I could change its moral tone without modifying that melodramatic tone. However, the end was a different matter. Gabriel and his younger sister Mireya - in my movie, Hassanayn and Nefisa in the novel - go to their appointment with death under a completely different narrative breath. For me, the brother leading the young prostitute to suicide was unthinkable, intolerable. The brother was the vehicle and the victim of fierce destiny, which, by forcing him to put an end to his sister turned whore, destroyed him in the process.

We moved from melodrama to tragedy. It was man against God. The change of genre captivated both Ripstein and me. We decided not only to use it, but to emphasize it. Indeed, the film uses two themes as background music for the first part: the melancholy "Death and the Maiden" by Schubert, and the quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto that speaks with the same passion of the downfall of a family.

But at the end of the story, when the two siblings leave the police station and head toward death, the film's music changes drastically. The Drums of the Bronx - French workers who played oil drums with mad frenzy in the '80s - change the narrative tone of the film and aid the passage from melodrama to tragedy. That set our tone. Now I had to find out how. In the first stage, I thought the solution to the suicide would be to jump in front of the subway.

Mexico City has no rivers at all. It is probably the only great capital without an ocean or a river running through it. The subway, thus, becomes the substitute for the Nile. The urban river that would swallow up the sister while the brother watched from the escalator by the other track. It was a difficult shot. Ripstein films in sequence shots. He films, therefore, in real time; what happens on screen takes the same screen time as life beyond the celluloid.

A sufficient amount of time had to pass on screen for the brother's repentance to be "believable," realistic. We made our calculations and decided it should be at least four minutes. Less than that and his decision seemed rushed, almost trifling, a mere histrionic gesture.

Shooting began. We had a permit to film. But we got the call that makes a film production tremble. We were refused permission to film in the city's subway system. The official in charge assured us that he was ready to lose his job before he would grant us the permit. He declared that filming a suicide in the subway was to promote it. He thought: "If they are going to kill themselves, let them do their nastiness somewhere else and not in My Subway." The mental labyrinth of lower bureaucrats has no logic or limits, only the diminished perimeter of their power.

We searched and found another solution that, in the final analysis, was fortunate. The suicide would take place in the very steam baths the sister frequented to practice her prostitution: an old building from the '40s, five stories high with many and sinful private rooms. Very Cairene. It was an ascent to hell.

Perfect, the loose ends were getting tied up, in addition to allowing us to film in interiors and lengthen the sequence to nine long minutes. Thus, the time of guilt was better established. I had to reread the novel - which I rarely do - to get the subway scene out of my eyes and rewrite it for the baths. To my amazement, when I reread it, I discovered that I had unconsciously inverted terms: In Mahfouz, it is the sister, generous and magnanimous, who spares the brother the painful task of killing her by proposing she commit suicide. Mahfouz has a weakness for female characters.

I, on the other hand, had inverted the situation. The chosen brother convinced his poor little sister to commit suicide. Selfish, Messiah and Savior in spite of himself, bearing the whole burden of his family, he opted for the perfect solution: thanks to him, she opted for suicide. The Savior is left with his hands clean of blood and guilt in his chest.
I had made the change without realizing it, while I wrote immersed in the frenzy of the last sequence. My sequence. We were shooting, it was the time to act and not to think of whys and hows. So the change in point of view went ahead without further reflection. Finally, it was the one that answered to my instincts and worldview.

Months later, with the film already edited and post-produced, even after it won at the San Sebastian Film Festival, as I watched a documentary on the honor murders that occur with certain frequency in some Arab countries, I realized that for Mahfouz, this was a moral condemnation of a concrete social act, a sociological judgement; for me, it was unthinkable, pure and simple. It was horror, and that horror required a Mephistopheles, or so I thought.

For years, I believed that that was the greatest difference between Mahfouz's novel and my screenplay. The point where two ways of facing reality meet and part, and that I, after all, was a daughter of the West. Years went by and, as fate would have it, no more than a month ago, I got another surprise. I read an article in a Mexican paper talking about how in 20 of the 30 Mexican states, that is to say, in two thirds of the country, there are laws that punish with lesser sentences, from three days to three years, husbands who murder their wives after these have sullied their honor. "Honor" exempted them from the sentences normally given to murderers. I jumped from my sofa.
My country was again approaching Mahfouz's Egypt without my knowing it, without my suspecting it. This wild and half breed Mexico still has fruitful laws that safeguard the honor of the family and that of the husband, above and beyond the life of alleged adulteresses. And I use the feminine, because this legislation only applies to males. What a surprise and what twists life offers. Again the resemblances.

Finally, watching other Mahfouz films, especially The Beginning and the End, which I saw without subtitles, I find over and over this familiar world that moves me by its proximity. Even the films of '60s and '70s, crossbred responses to La Dolce Vita, in which both countries showed that the modernity that had impregnated them to the point of depravation, are identical. Equally forced, fake, falsely "modern."

Mahfouz's world approaches mine. Now, it is my world. I incorporated Mahfouz into my intellectual biography just as I did Dostoyevsky, the Brontes, Vargas Llosa and Amos Oz. Today, he is as mine, as much a part of me, as any writer from my land and in my language. He is part of that vast country that is reading.

I am satisfied with the transfer we made of Mahfouz's world to the Mexican universe. Therefore, when I think of The Beginning and the End, the movie, I do so with delight. When I think of the novel, I do so with great pleasure, intimate and secret because, like all great novels, one holds the basic assumption that it was written only for oneself. And, finally, when I think of Mahfouz, I think of him with cherished intimacy. The intimacy of the old neighbor, the uncle, the witness to my biography, mine and that of so many others.

That mute witness, affectionate and close who, in telling his stories, his tales, allows us to untangle humanity, to dissect hearts. The black and white, contradictory, generous and petty hearts of everyday man, of our daily neighbor. Mahfouz has died, and with him the storyteller is gone. And the barrio has gone mute.