A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me

by Youssef Fadel

  The house is off-limits to me now, but their plan won’t succeed for long. I have friends in high places, lawyers and judges, although I don’t see this as the most opportune moment to cause a fuss. There’s no point in bringing about another scandal that might play against me during this tense time. I have always been a skillful and intelligent player. I need to act with the utmost discretion. “Seek help in meeting your needs silently.” I’ve always lived by that hadith. It’s not the first time I’ve faced such adversities. Everything passes. I must not give the enemy additional ammunition; I mustn’t give the impression of weakness or despair. Plus, the house had been emptied of its contents some time ago. The rugs had disappeared ages ago, and her son had sold what remained of the dishes at the flea market. Nothing remained except for the walls standing witness to the vileness of Aziza and her mother.

  I passed by Sidi Slimane and thought of the family I once had there. Should I visit them? I should at least go see that son who writes the off-color sketches. Maybe he was right in insulting the government as Zerwal, may God have mercy on him, had informed me that day. I don’t like the government. And the king? I don’t know what to think of him after what has happened recently. During the past week I sent numerous gifts—some of which cost me a pretty penny—and the guard reassured me that they would arrive. The following day he reassured me that they had indeed arrived, and he confirmed that the king would receive me in a few days’ time, but there’s no way of knowing whether he was being truthful, or whether he was lying. He said to me, “No doubt this time you’ll receive the honor of appearing before His Majesty. His Majesty seemed energetic this morning. He woke up whistling a merry tune, his face shining, and he had his wig on. His face had a look that said he would summon you soon. I’ve spoken to him about it, and although he didn’t respond verbally, he appeared to be seriously considering the matter. All indications show that your request has entered his heart and mind.”

  There’s no way of being sure of anything with these uncivilized brutes. I know them all too well. I’ve spent more than my share of time with them and I know their tricks. They’re all cast from the same mold. He said that the king had gone away, then he said that he had returned, so I presented more gifts to mark the occasion, with no way of knowing whether they reached him or not. These gifts are what will result in me reclaiming my position, my work, my honor, but there’s no way to be sure of anything. I don’t know where my gifts go once they leave my hands.

  So, Balloute the jester is almost sixty years old, and happy with the luck he has been destined to receive. He ate his bread cold for almost fifteen years. He doesn’t give a thought to the day he was born, or to the day he will die. He has only one care in the world: how to return to what he was—a jester in a chorus of jesters. This is his past and his future. I can’t picture another future outside of His Majesty’s shadow. I make him laugh and provide diversions for him so that his mind remains alert.

  And Aziza? Has her heart shut me out completely, and with such speed? Not even two years have passed since our first meeting. I’ve become a bit confused and I don’t know which weighs heavier on my heart. Yes, sixty years old and still my heart flutters and my fingers shake whenever I recall that day when she called out my name. The memory of our intimate nights plays over and over in my head while Aziza remains in my house harboring nothing but hatred for me. No, she doesn’t hate me. Her mother is behind it all. Two eccentric women living in my house, eating my bread, and thinking little of me. They take my money and my gifts, they take my heart and my mind, and they give only hatred in return. Pleasant words had flowed from Aziza’s mouth that day two years ago when we met. Sure, many pleasant words came out of her mouth, but the words seemed as if they flowed like water into the sand; they disappeared quickly. Couldn’t that be considered a form of hatred? Would you expect a woman to whom you’ve given your money and your heart to pay you back in such a cruel way? I gave her everything. For two years I had been promising her that I would buy her a luxury apartment in Gueliz, which was what her mother wanted so as to be rid of me as quickly as possible. But Aziza didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the idea, saying neither yes or no. Whenever I would talk to her about the apartment she would purse her lips in a grimace somewhere between a smile and a scowl. Maybe that was her way of hiding her true intentions.

  What does this girl want? A truly eccentric girl. She doesn’t ask for anything or refuse anything. She doesn’t see any difference between dining in the finest restaurant or going to bed hungry. She only sees what her mother sees. Her face doesn’t show that she has been granted special distinction for sitting at my table. She doesn’t betray any hint that she values my efforts. If this isn’t hatred I don’t know what it is. It’s true that she hates me more than anything else. The only thing on her mind is revenge for my having come along to marry her just when she needed to marry in order to escape her family. All of these ideas occur to me in an attempt to understand, to come to terms with, to comprehend this contempt. It should be the opposite—that she think of me night and day, and that she wait longingly for me. It should be that my presence makes her swoon and that my absence tortures her. She should thank me for my kindness toward her and the generous gestures I show her. But it is not like this at all. It’s as if I’m only doing what I’m supposed to do. It seems like sometimes she doesn’t possess the same intellect that other people do. As for her heart, it is fragile, quickly damaged. She tried committing suicide once, days before I married her. I remember I went to see her in the hospital, and to justify or hide what she had done she held her bandaged wrists up in front of me, saying that she had used a dull razor, as if she wanted to say that she wasn’t serious about it.

  Who can understand women? Sometimes I say to myself, “Maybe she did it because of me; maybe she secretly loves me, and that was the natural thing to do. Her hands were covered with white bandages, and underneath the bandages there were minor cuts, signs of her love and her hardness.” Sometimes jealousy eats away at me when I think of other possible reasons for her suicide attempt that are no less sound. Might her love for someone else have pushed her to it? This is also possible—more than possible. Other times it is enough for me to shake my head and repeat, “Who can understand women?” She completely occupied my thoughts. With what she had done, she put me entirely at her mercy and had taken the upper hand. I no longer thought about anything but marrying her. Her wish was my command. My only desire, my last desire, was to spend what was left of my life at her side.

  I’m nothing but a stupid old man, without the least bit of dignity, and with the smell of decay seeping from my pores. No one will save me. I think about staging an open-ended protest in front of the palace door, or in front of the government headquarters, or in front of the parliament, so that passersby will know what injustice has been done to me. Sometimes I want to throw open the windows and scream at the top of my lungs so that people near and far will hear that I have been wronged. I take the cap that I wore on many occasions because His Majesty used to love it. I kiss it repeatedly. I turn it lovingly in my hands. I pass my fingers gently over it as if I were asking it for help. I think about the injustice that has been done to me, about how I am a person whose rights have been violated. I pick up old issues of Paris Match and look at the pictures of me accompanying His Majesty on the Champs-Élysées, or on the deck of the Ibn Battouta ship, smiling, a glass of champagne in my hand. I cut out the numerous pictures and put them up on the bare walls. I sit and study the color pictures. I am just fine with my pictures. I haven’t felt this sort of calm in a while. My eyes overflow with tears of happiness as I look at my past laid out before me in such riotous colors.

  I am just fine at home, in the company of His Majesty on my bedroom wall. I won’t go to see Fatima, my old wife. For the past two days I had sent my friend Si Hussein the barber to gather news of the old house and who was there. He told me that Fadila was to marry. And the boy? He’d been drafted into the army. Why was I intere
sted in them? I wasn’t going to go to see them. My own worries are enough for me. I have no desire to lay eyes on a son who insulted the government. What would they say there in the palace? I won’t fall into that trap. Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for—for my fall from grace to be complete.

  The garçonnière is empty as well. The wall clocks and silver dishes have disappeared. They were taken by the building’s caretaker, or the cook, or some other person I have no way of knowing. It’s impossible to know where my gifts have disappeared to. The caretaker said that they had been returned to those who sent them, with nothing remaining except for the glass aquarium on the shelf with the fish swimming in it. Gone are the gifts I had received on special occasions, and for no occasion at all. Gone are the Persian rugs. But there still remains the little red and black fishes swimming up and down, imprisoned in a basin of water half a meter high, and these pictures—His Majesty and I on the Champs-Élysées, His Majesty and I on the deck of the Ibn Battouta, His Majesty and I on a hunting trip, each of us holding a rifle and smiling for the camera, aiming the barrels of our rifles at the photographer and laughing, and this lump as a big as a ball stuck in my throat, making it all but impossible to breathe.

  The walls begin to close in on me, so I leave the garçonnière. It is evening. Suspended time. I drag my feet along the streets for half an hour before heading to the house of the barber and the cobbler. I have a pleasant time in their company. The kif smoke calms my nerves. The barber picks up the oud. My mind is set free by the smoke and by the melody flowing from the fingers of my friend the barber. As I float for a while in another realm, the clamor of the world lightens. I thank him silently. I am relaxed. I’m not sure how much time passes while I’m in this state.

  As I’m going down the stairs I stumble and fall. That’s what I remember. The barber and the cobbler say that I fell down the stairs and didn’t stop until I got to the front of the house. I don’t remember any of this. They also say that I lost consciousness and didn’t open my eyes for some time. Where am I now? In my old house, with them at my bedside watching over me. They take the opportunity to tell me that that they brought me to my old house because that’s what I wanted. Did I say that to them? Together, they indicate yes, and then they leave. Perhaps it really did happen like that.

  I turn to look around. In my old house, on my old bed, breathing in old smells I had forgotten, coming to me only from memory. I leave the bedroom, limping. My foot hurts. I stop in the middle of the courtyard. My wife Fatima doesn’t get up to greet me, and to give the appearance that she’s busy with something of the utmost importance she raises her dough-filled hands. She is preparing gazelle-horn cookies, which the guests will devour next week. Fadila is done with her dough. She has shed many tears as she welcomes me into her arms. Her mother Fatima also cries, but from a distance. Her crying isn’t as convincing as Fadila’s. Fadila loves me. I’m moved and place my hand on my thigh to compose myself.

  My wrist has swollen a little. I go back to the bedroom and see that the swelling has increased and the skin is bruised. The pain has gotten worse. Being in this house increases my pain and misery. I send Fatima to summon the mosque’s imam, who also works taking care of the hammam. The faqih rubs my foot with hot oil and wraps it in a bandage. The following day I discover that my limp attracts the curiosity of the people around me, and as a result they stop asking me embarrassing and malicious questions. As long as the bandage remains on my leg, no one questions me too far or shows too much malice toward me. I can walk around my old streets and buy my bread in peace. I hope that my limp will continue indefinitely so that they won’t pay attention to my other handicap—how long that will last I don’t know.

  Every once in a while, my foot hurts. Not the same foot that was in pain a few days before as a result of falling down the barber Si Hussein’s stairs. No, the other foot, or maybe it is the same foot. I can no longer distinguish between the two. I can no longer tell. My head hurts too.

  15

  Day Six

  THE STORY OF OUR FRIEND Naafi is neither entertaining nor pleasant, especially the part where he went raving mad and began to dig around the fort trying to find his missing leg. When his raging madness calmed down a little, he continued to sit at the gate under the shadow of the wall asking about his vanished leg, or he wandered around the fort, hopping on the crutches we made out of boards from the destroyed supply store, as if expecting to see the man who had opened fire on him.

  I didn’t see his leg, and neither did Mohamed Ali, just as we didn’t see the bullets. When Naafi was wounded, I wasn’t there to hear the shots or see the Kalashnikov bullets tearing through his leg. I was getting some sun in the far corner of the courtyard waiting for Joumana, the general’s daughter, to wake up so I could tell her I wouldn’t be taking her to her father General Bouricha’s farm for him to bless our marriage. I had already told her I was married, that I had a wife who was sick and who cared a great deal for me. After the miserable hunting trip it seemed that she was interested in me and that she had decided all on her own—as General Bouricha and all wealthy people do—that she would marry me for a period of time, as if I were a doll she could play with for a little bit. I would rather have found myself on the front lines than in bed with this worm. I was thinking about this and, in fact, was so preoccupied by it that I didn’t even hear the gunshots. I was busy thinking about the matter of Joumana and her father when I saw four soldiers leave Sergeant Bouzide’s office and run out of the fort, and then return carrying Naafi on their blood-soaked shoulders.

  His leg was torn apart, its bone sticking out and shattered like glass. The thigh was enormous because of the quantity of shredded cloth wrapped around it. The blackened dried blood on the rags that covered what remained of his leg, as well as on the soldiers’ shirts, shoulders, and hair, made them look like they had been playing in the mud. Naafi is quite fragile. In fact, his body is so thin that even without bullets, the wind could knock him over. He appeared even tinier and slimmer as he shrank into himself, teeth chattering. They placed him in the middle of the courtyard. And the bullets? They were still lodged in Naafi’s splintered leg. We wondered whether we should leave them where they were. Many soldiers have sustained injuries with the bullets left lodged in their thighs, legs, and heads. With time the pain goes away, while the bullets remain behind as a reminder. Wounds heal, scars form, and memories shine like a defunct lighthouse illuminating a future no one else will see.

  They set him down in the middle of the courtyard and went back to playing cards with the sergeant. What else were we supposed to do with the summer heat blazing? As we rushed toward him, Mohamed Ali and I asked him whether we should leave the bullets where they were or remove them. Naafi was almost completely withdrawn from us, swallowing his pain as he looked in the direction of the bar and wondered whether Fifi, the bar’s owner, could see him in this miserable condition. The bar was on the other side of the fort, behind the walls, and thus difficult to see. Nonetheless, Naafi could see it at that moment and wondered whether Fifi was looking at him from the window and saying to herself that he no longer resembled Alain Delon. What could we do except wait for the doctor to come from Agadir? He would know the best course of action.

  This whole time, Naafi was silent, lying in the middle of the courtyard staring in the direction of the bar with a look of disappointment in his eyes. His smile was sad. Naafi loved to laugh. He would even laugh at the story of his father’s death. Naafi loved to laugh and eat gazelle meat, and he loved Fifi. He used to say that he would never leave this place. He would marry her and they would run the bar together, selling drinks to soldiers under the table, just as Fifi does now, and we would go along with him just to prolong the dream. Now Naafi said nothing. He waited for the doctor who wasn’t in his office. We took him to an adjoining room because of the heat, staying close to the gate, to the bar, and to his thoughts about Fifi, which came to him between moments of fitful sleep and periodic stretches of unconsciousness. Na
afi had not yet begun his state of delirium. The lights were still on in many parts of his brain, but his leg was shattered, and the pain had reached an intolerable level. No one was bold enough to remove the rag it was wrapped in. And what would be the use of removing it? We would find a leg like any of the other legs pierced by the bullets of an enemy whose whereabouts we didn’t know, and whose distance from us we were unable to measure.

  When he’s around, the general sometimes gives us the impression that he knows who the enemy is, but at other times he gives us an entirely different impression. In any case, he’s now busy at his farm pressing olives. The general loves to see the oil flow between his fingers, but at times like this, when the enemy opens fire on us, we don’t know how to respond to it because the general hasn’t yet told us what to do.

  The enemy wears the same clothes as we do, they speak the same language, they sing the same songs, and they dream the same dreams that inspire all of us, but they aren’t visible to us as we are to them. It’s enough that they open fire on us and whether we’re at the well or on the ramparts of the fort, their bullets reach us. At that very moment, their bullets were still lodged in Naafi’s leg awaiting the doctor’s arrival. After a morning spent on the beach getting some sun, he finally came. He told us that he had been attending a soccer match between doctors and nurses at the hospital’s playing field that had lasted for the entire hot morning. The leg had swollen and the pain had sapped all of Naafi’s strength. The sun had burned the doctor’s skin after a morning spent officiating a soccer match.