“It isn’t I who give up beings and things (I could not); it’s the things and the beings who have given me up. My youth escapes me; that is being ill.”
“You can cure yourself if you want to.” –Albert Camus
Then the coughing began,
consumptive, a rattle and thrust
in the decrepit flat
beside the Mediterranean.
Growing up in poverty
in Algiers, never knowing
his father, he groaned
in an unfeeling apartment
with no books.
Soccer was his passion,
and in it he excelled,
though he harbored a taste
for Sophocles, for strength
and tragedy. Then, diagnosed,
he was bedridden for months,
weak-lunged and banished
from sport—the source,
he later confessed, of all
he ever learned of ethics: to trust
his teammates, stepping calmly
and fully conscious, the ball
revolving at his feet.
Floating scant and ghastly
in a fog of tuberculosis,
he fought for courage
that would carry him
into the common years
of bleeding articles
and the weathered suitcase
of failed love.
Already, he was pestered
by the...