'Insomnia', a fable about the need to kill to beat sleepless nights

The writer Tahar Ben Jelloun.BERNARDO PÉREZ

Many people suffer from insomnia, a sentence of sleepless nights that can become an obsession.

And some can even date the beginning of their illness.

On January 28, 1968, the Franco-Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun (Fez, Morocco, 1947) returns to his parents' house in Tangier after having suffered 19 months of detention, disguised as forced recruitment, along with 93 other students who had peacefully participated in one of the demonstrations that were held in 1965 in the main Moroccan cities in petition for a democratic opening.

Protests repressed with blood and fire with the result of more than a thousand deaths.

They were the lead years of King Hassan II, father of the current Alaouite monarch, Mohamed VI.

The then young Philosophy student in Rabat suffered an ordeal of harassment, cold,

, needed "close to 50 years" until he managed to expose it in a text, as he confesses in the last line of

(2018).

In that book, an autobiographical story published in Spanish the same year by Cabaret Voltaire, he writes that the day in 1968 on which that nightmare ended, another sentence began: “I go round and round.

From my season of suffering I have brought a new companion: insomnia.

I have suffered from it ever since.

I think I have tried everything to have a peaceful and deep sleep.

There is no way: sleeping has become something unusual, something impossible”.

Ben Jelloun knows what he's talking about when he writes about empty nights.

For this reason, in the same way that the events of the 1960s turned him into a narrator —“without the harsh trials, the injustices I suffered, I would never have dedicated myself to writing”, he admits in

, it is likely that without the problems to fall asleep that those horrors unleashed, he would not have been able to undertake the writing of his last book,

.

Or not, at least, the same book.

A fable about a man who discovers that accelerating people's passage to the afterlife - he does not consider himself a murderer, but rather a "precipitator" of death - gives him restful nights of sleep, more nights and more restful the longer he sleeps. worst has been the victim of his particular remedy.

Insomnia

is, unlike

, a fiction - as far as is known, Ben Jelloun has not murdered anyone.

Although the protagonist, a screenwriter, has loans from the writer, such as his love of jazz and classic films, the black and white of Ava Gardner and Gene Tierney, of Kirk Douglas and Gary Cooper.

Although he also knows people tortured by the regime or exiled in France like Ben Jelloun himself, or he feels the same indignation at the bastards who die in his beds.

And, finally, although they also share the same headaches, those terrible headaches that the writer believes are related to insomnia.

The author tells in

that experiencing the suffering of those empty nights or the pain of burning and continuous headaches later allows you to better savor the simple things in life: "Life without pain has an exquisite flavor."

And, for this reason, he has been able to truthfully invent the desperation of that nameless narrator who murders, initially only people who are already threatened with death, and recreate —without regret, without any moral dilemma— those barely healing executions, since, like drug tolerance, they do not provide you with a permanent remedy.

“It was as if the secondary effects of my crime had dissipated little by little”, he discovers a year after his homicidal debut, the death by suffocation of his sick mother, “so did I need to continue killing to overcome insomnia?” .

And indeed, they are only deaths as credit for future calm nights.

His mother, a whole year, the same as the Witch, or Violin, the pederast, or the torturer.

Other victims barely give him a three-month break income.

The killer, who sometimes assimilates them with the indulgence of a euthanasia practice, lives his evil as if it were a punishment, that an invisible court has sentenced him to "a sentence without prior plea, without the right to defense".

A punishment that he believes is disproportionate and even more so without knowing what his previous crime was.

“Not sleeping implies being deprived of dreaming”, he laments, because he needs to dream to feed his imagination.

“Insomnia deprives the unconscious of its own life”, he complains, because he feels dispossessed of balance,

Perhaps that is why the protagonist, victim and executioner at the same time, is not judged in this book, whose credibility is not affected by the impunity with which crimes are carried out that, on the other hand, do not arouse anyone's suspicions.

It is just a fable without a moral, populated, yes, by an entertaining gallery of characters from the Tangier underworld: pimps and bankers, prostitutes and nurses, mobsters and policemen, vengeful ex-wives and rich widows... A story that will not palliate the barren evenings of the hypothetical insomniac reader, but that may help him cope (without the need to kill anyone).

“White and hollow nights”.

This is how the murderer's hours pass.

"Her emptiness of him tortures me and drives me crazy."

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