Brown Scarf Blues by Mois Benarroch

of or rehearsed or prepared. No matter how obvious it was that he wasn’t even in the running, or known, or famous, or even decently infamous enough to have the slightest chance at the prize. But that wasn’t the worst, it was that two days later he would get over it and become the most modest of humans, who hated for people to talk to him about his writing, and worse, it bothered him if anyone said how well he wrote. In this, he was indeed different from the other artists I met. I never understood whether it was true modesty, or if it was the exact opposite and was his way of feeling he was beyond other human beings. Many times he told me, “I have the ego, the huge ego, the ego of egos, the Porteño ego par excellence , I have it only when I write, when I’m writing I feel like a God, and not a small God as the poet Huidobro said, but like a gigantic God and maybe even a little greater, because God is God by nature, but I must elevate myself and make an effort to create a new world, but once I leave my computer I don’t consider myself better than anyone, and I don’t consider my daily life any more important than an ant’s.”
    He saw the world only through creation, for him, man was a sacred being only if he created. He saw no value in those who earned money or built a house, unless they created something new, unless they gave existence to something that did not exist before.
    But he also wasn’t much interested in artists and didn’t have many friends who were writers, he knew a lot of them but he preferred to go to the souk to eat in cheap restaurants, and he preferred to travel by bus. “That’s where you’ll find life and people,” he used to tell me. “That’s where you’ll find stories, future novels. You can’t learn much from people who think they’re important, who think they’re rich, who think they have something. We have nothing.”
    Dialogue between us was impossible, of course. He came from a moneyed, middle-class family, and was willing to lose what he had, or what he used to have, in order to write. I come from poverty and being a writer is a way of being middle class. Or that’s what he used to tell me though I didn’t agree. But today I realize he was right in a way, though things are never that simple. But we fought over that, because he told me he always risked everything with his words and that I wasn’t willing to take any risks at all. That was a massive lie. Fuck off, you lying bastard.

1988
    I met him in Paris, and until today I didn’t know he had published all those books. When I knew him he never mentioned he was a writer or had been published. We studied natural medicine together at the IHMN - Institut d’Hygiène et de Médecine Naturelle, which was in Melun. He seemed very introspective and didn’t interact much with the other students. It was as though all he ever did was talk to himself about something very important. Sometimes he even did it out loud. During breaks between classes he would go for walks in the woods that surrounded the institute. Finally, thanks to the language, we started to talk a little, but he always counted his words. Then one day on the train back to Paris, he loosened up and from then on he would constantly speak his mind. We became good friends and I even made a trip to Israel once and stayed at his home. There I met his charming wife, who was French, and we later met in Paris. Once, I think he even suggested we make love. I said no. I’m not sure why, since I was definitely attracted to him. He talked a lot about vaccines, and that’s what he eventually wrote his thesis on. He was very much against them, more than anyone else, but he seemed angry and disillusioned at everybody because of those vaccines. It got to where he thought all his problems were a result of the ones he’d been given as a child, and even that vaccines had killed his little brother. In those days he was deeply in love with a French girl named Marlene, I remember