22
WATER FLOWS OVER MY BODY. The fear that had been winding my watch has disappeared. Tick tock tick tock. The anxiety and the dread, the anticipation and fear of God, all of this has disappeared. My former life was nothing more than a hubbub that, in the end, I have no need for. Lying on a damp plank in the kitchen. They didn’t deem it necessary to wash me in my old bedroom, or in a respectable room with a door that locks. The dead have no dignity. Tick tock tick tock. The echo of an empty room. Things become distant. Water flows. The water of mercy. I hadn’t felt that I had needed it before now. The features of my old associates have disappeared. I cannot make out a single one of them.
I’m living my life upside down. I have all the time in the world to see what I hadn’t seen before. I walk from darkness into light. The light is dim here, and the people under it all seem the same. The same mysterious faces, the same frames, and the same clothing, but their languages are different. Each one speaks his own strange dialect. They aren’t angels; nor are they devils, even though they’re far from being human. I am among them. I walk through them, but I am not one of them. I walk until I get to the other end of the tunnel. I feel myself advancing through my transition from one darkness to a lesser darkness. Because it is a long tunnel, houses are scattered on either side of it. Cities are spread out along it—entire cities—but few trees, and there are swamps all along the road. They walk along it without complaint, without noticing the awful stench coming from it. I’m pleased how I was able to spend my life on this earth without grumbling.
There was a time when I couldn’t stand sitting in the same place for long periods of time. Now every part of me is calm. I feel neither hot nor cold, neither happiness nor misery. Someone is pouring water over me. Man or woman? And why wouldn’t it be Aziza who came to amuse herself with how horrible I looked? The way she pours the water is violent, filled with hatred. Her fingers get close to my corpse then recoil in disgust. I hear water spilling. I hear its laughter, the laughter of water. Ha ha ha. My hands don’t move, nor do my fingers or my eyes. There are no more surprises in store for me. All surprises are now behind me. Water flows over my head. There’s no hair on my head or on my brow. There’s no hair on my body at all. I hadn’t noticed that before. A complete jester.
My body is sound, nothing wrong with it. No defects on it like Zerwal’s hump. We are leaving intact, so that much we’ve won. The water passes over me. It flows without obstacles. Water infused with rose and clove. The water of mercy. I lack for nothing. Even the change of venue seems to be a mere added luxury. How beautiful it is for someone to stay where he is without faces and words messing it up. As stone he came, and as stone he will go—a stone that made people laugh. I was always a funny person.
What are they doing there in the courtyard other than preparing the water for washing? Are they laughing? And in the palace? And in the barber’s house? Everyone’s laughing. No doubt they’re thinking about my jokes, tricks, and stunts. Ha ha ha. How funny Balloute was . . . funny, and kind to boot. He played his improvised role and went on his way.
But was I funny enough? Did I play my role to the fullest? My jesting never passed without leaving in its wake a full army of people who were jealous of me and who adored me, as well as people who were angry with me, enemies, imitators, and fawners. This is a beautiful and pleasant memory that will accompany me to my grave, if my corpse doesn’t fall en route. That too could happen. Anything is possible when it comes to people.
23
Day Ten
THREE DAYS WENT BY. No trace of Zineb. I thought about doing some exercise to pass the time until she came back, but I found that my heart and my head were not in agreement. My desire was to sit and wait. I went through some old papers I had written on. They were from a period when I was thinking about writing shows using a numerical language. One day during my long adolescence it seemed to me a discovery worth delving into, truly revolutionary. I was enthusiastic about the project. Shows written according to numbers rather than complicated meters. Save for a few unclear paragraphs, I hadn’t gotten very far. I tossed the papers aside and left the house, heading for the bus station. The entire way I was thinking about Zineb. I was unable to focus on anything besides her.
I arrived in this city on a rainy morning. I met with a television executive about a show that I had presented for the students in the Faculty of Science. This executive told me that the television station was interested in my work. Then, a week later, he told me that the contract was ready and all I had to do was come to their offices to sign it. This happened before I was drafted into service in the Sahara. I called him back yesterday after burying my father. The ordeal wasn’t easy. We arrived at the cemetery in the late afternoon and the guard had already locked the gate. He thought nothing of sending us back home with our dead body, just a simple matter of him spending an additional night with us, filling us with fear. The guard was adamant in his refusal, saying that we had to come back the following day because the last gravedigger had left the cemetery some time ago. We spent half an hour negotiating, raising our hands in supplication to him and his family, but he wouldn’t budge an inch. We had reached the limit of our desperation when we saw a fancy car stop in front of the cemetery gate. A hunchbacked man dressed in white and wearing a red tarboosh emerged from it, as if for an impromptu cabaret show. With his hump and his limp, he looked quite funny. He took the guard aside, whispered in his ear, and returned to the car. The guard hurried to open the gate as the hunchback’s car drove away. We exchanged glances. None of us knew who the man was, and perhaps we never would.
I roam the streets of an unfamiliar city thinking about Zineb. She’s not at her house or at her sister Leila’s house. She’s nowhere to be found, which means that she’s with the doctor and his wife. It is for her sake that I am making the effort of traveling to earn some money. Would I be able to sell one of my shows to the television network? I’m very pessimistic about this. If only she knew that I had come back. Lots of cars fill the sidewalks and pedestrians walk in the middle of the cavernous streets. Buses don’t stop at their stops, they just honk their frightening horns and move along, whereas taxis stop when no one signals for them to do so. Everything is upside down in this city. Pools of water in the alleyways, a cart pulled by a tired donkey with infected sores on its neck, a child poking the sores with a large nail causing the donkey to jump with an impossible effort to move forward, although he can’t move forward anymore.
I don’t head in any particular direction. I don’t know where the television offices are. I lose my way a number of times and when I ask passersby they point in opposite directions. There’s a person waiting for me someplace in this sprawling city. It’s the general manager, who will welcome me himself, but I’m still stuck asking for directions, waiting for a bus that doesn’t arrive, and then hearing a taxicab’s brakes screech suddenly before me, its driver suggesting I go to a place that isn’t the place I want to go to. Truly a strange city.
The general manager’s secretary welcomed me in an exaggerated way and brought me a black coffee while I waited for the boss to finish his morning meeting. She asked me about my father, smiling as if she were sharing a secret with me. She told me that she was the one behind the manager’s agreement to meet with me because she had told him who I was and who my father was. She’s from Marrakech and knows all the families of Marrakech, from A to Z. I thanked her for her initiative. The same enthusiasm appeared on the manager’s face as he grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down repeatedly while he turned to his assistants, who immediately entered the office carrying files under their arms. He apologized for not knowing my works, although he said that he valued and respected them. “Our audience likes to laugh a lot, and God willing, it will all be good.”
He asked me to present an excerpt of one of my comedy routines for him, which I did. A few minutes before, while standing on a corner, I had seen a policeman bring his truncheon down on someone walking by, and this is what I was prep
ared to talk about with the television manager—the story of the policeman and his truncheon, but I nixed that idea because I didn’t think it wouldn’t work on the small screen. Instead, I presented another one of my sketches to him, which made him laugh long and hard. Summarizing his position, he said, “You just have to change the ending, the whole ending. We don’t want any problems with the authorities.”
The manager left his office for a while. I rethought the story from beginning to end. This took up almost the whole time the manager was out of the room. When he returned he appeared friendlier and had a thick volume in his hands. I told him the new ending but he paid no attention to it. He placed his hand on my shoulder and told me that he had found the perfect job for someone of my talents. He had come across the epic commemorating the twentieth anniversary of His Majesty’s ascension to the throne of his ancestors, and he was suggesting I rewrite some of its passages, which had been written by two well-known playwrights. Because the king would attend the performance personally, it would be necessary to change some scenes deemed inappropriate for him. For my part, I wasn’t convinced of the nature of this type of work, or whether I should trust the manager’s intentions. Surely he was mocking me, laughing at me. I wasn’t interested in his suggestions and the manager seemed to me to be an idiot, despicable, like all managers. Despite that, and because my circumstances required money, I promised him that I would give it some serious thought and return with concrete suggestions in the afternoon. Work is a blessing from above that gives me endless joy, but not this degrading type of work. If not for Zineb I would have slammed the door in his face and left.
When I returned in the afternoon with the papers I had prepared, his private secretary, Madame Razi, met me. She wasn’t smiling like she had been that morning. She told me that the manager wasn’t there. He had traveled abroad. I had just seen him a few hours before, behind his desk, clapping and rubbing my shoulder and laughing. He had extended his hand to me when I finished performing my sketch about the policeman, but without his truncheon. He told me that he had never laughed more than he had laughed this morning. He thought the idea was quite profitable and added that he would see to my case personally. And this was in front of all of the television station employees. Even Madame Razi was there.
Then I came back in the afternoon to find that everything had changed, that the general manager had flown abroad. How could he have flown without my having seen wings on him that morning when he met with me? Madame Razi said that the manager had changed his mind, that what I had presented didn’t meet his standards. I asked her again, clearly and firmly, to see the manager, and she repeated that he had traveled abroad, trying to look busy as if she had no time to waste with me. She told me dryly that if I was interested in the manager’s suggestion, she was the one responsible for the epic. She began to discuss the epic and how to revise it. She didn’t look at the pages I had placed in front of her. She said that she had another idea. She herself would take responsibility for rewriting the dialogues. It was more than I could bear, especially when the manager came out of his office and stood for a moment listening to her nonsense, smiling and nodding in agreement with her awful observations. Then he went back into his office while I went back to wandering the streets in the most awful mood.
When I left the television office, the orderly said to me, “You won’t get anything from that whore. She’s the manager’s lover and she only accepts projects that her family and relatives bring to her.” Rather than get angry, I found that what the orderly told me put me in a better mood. I’m not the only one with worries. We’re all drowning in them.
24
Day Eleven
I HEADED TO THE FARM where I thought the doctor and his wife would be holed up. On the way I bumped into a childhood friend who had become a teacher. He hadn’t changed much, except for the stupid smile he had acquired from inhaling too much chalk dust. He greeted me warmly and asked for my help in promoting his election campaign because the neighbors respected me. “The local elections,” he clarified. Only at that moment did I realize that some sort of elections were approaching, and that they represented his chance to become a chief or a secretary, his opportunity to try out the viciousness he was destined for when he joined the local council to steal the money of the citizens who carried him to office. His party, like all the parties, was enlisting teachers and lawyers such as him, this eternal family of hyenas that smells its prey from afar. His eyes smiled and his stupidity broadened, and as if he knew what I was thinking, he bowed his head. I comforted him and rubbed his shoulder in the same warm manner as he had done to me. Then I left, cursing him and his ilk.
The farm was located outside of the city. On the bus I thought about Zineb, at first without hope, then with high hopes of finding her at the doctor’s farm. Despite what her sister Leila had said about her recovery, I still pictured her weak and sick. This was how I always saw her, in constant need of rest and relaxation. Then I thought about how the country air would be good for her and that it would return her to health. She’s fragile and needs a lot of tenderness. I picture her always needing me. She could never bear my being away from home for more than a day or two. When I would leave town for a performance, I would see her sad face saying good-bye to me from the front door of our house, wishing me happy travels, and begging me not to stay away too long. At those moments, my eyes would fill with tears. I would tell myself how lucky I was and only hoped that my good fortune could be shared with all the earth’s creatures. After the abortion we passed through a difficult period. The bond that joined us together simply blew away in the wind. Our relationship teetered. Her health was no longer what it once was. She had left a piece of herself in the hospital.
Her health returned when she thought about returning to singing—this time seriously, she told me. She had always dreamed of becoming a professional singer, and the time had come. Her previous enthusiasm was renewed. The Zineb I had known two years prior was returning little by little, as if we were coming back out into the light. For a period of some months, a new lifeblood graced the house. The composer would come at ten in the morning, oud under his arm, and wouldn’t leave until late in the afternoon, sometimes not until late at night. He was someone she knew from the cabaret where she was working. For the first time in his long life he had been given the opportunity to reveal his hidden talents and excessive enthusiasm that surpassed Zineb’s by quite a long way. The old composer had regained his youth. Thanks to Zineb he was to become famous and his melodies would shine in the skies of true music. It seemed like the musician had settled in our house, and from my standpoint I didn’t see any reason to prevent him from staying since our renewed happiness was linked to the atmosphere that the musician helped spread to every corner.
From ten in the morning until late in the evening they would spend the day wandering around the house—Zineb singing while he plucked at his oud strings. From the room where I was writing my sketches I could hear her sweet voice singing, “They Reminded Me,” and I said to myself that it was she who needed this old man to drag the last remnants of the end of his life behind her to completely restore her to health. She needed someone to set the rhythm of her voice anew. More than this, she needed to regain confidence in herself. Yes, Zineb was right as usual. Zineb loved Oum Kulthum, she loved me, and it was as if she was addressing me directly when she sang, “How could they remind me if I haven’t forgotten you?” Her voice echoed all day throughout the house. She was light in her long gown like a bird that has discovered the joy of soaring up high, and in her nightgown when she lay down beside me warbling softly.
On the day of the concert Zineb spent the better part of the morning rehearsing with the regional orchestra, twenty instrumentalists in their somber black outfits, twenty employees, playing and exchanging jokes. Some of them were smoking as if they were doing routine work such as shining shoes or selling bread, or as if they were civil servants. Zineb was not reassured. I spent the afternoon encouraging her. She was sc
ared. Her face was yellow, her lips dry, and her smile pallid. This was natural. Zineb wasn’t about to spend the evening singing in the cabaret. Rather, she was facing a new room with new lights and a new audience, accompanied by the employees of the regional orchestra who played as if they were kneading morning bread. When she sang it seemed as if something was annoying her. I watched her from behind the curtain and from time to time she turned toward me. I realized after a few minutes that the band members had raised the music’s key and that her singing had begun to sound like screeching. After a few moments she couldn’t keep up with the musicians, and in the middle of the song she stopped singing and rushed backstage under the whistling and protests of the audience and the chuckling of the musicians, who were quite happy with their performance. She spent the rest of the night in tears. She didn’t sleep. Could anyone who had suffered such a setback ever recover?
In the morning she was unable to utter a sound. She had lost her voice. She would open her mouth but no sound would emerge. It was definitely cause for worry and disappointment. She swallowed some honey and took some pills, but her condition didn’t improve. Finally she sought help from paper and pen, writing out her thoughts and desires. For the first few days it was a sad scene. The bird had stopped chirping as if its family had left home. The house was empty and cold. The silence that enveloped the house was not silence; it was closer to frost, as if we had moved to a continent made of ice. Things changed when she came around to the idea of the little notebook in which she would write down what she needed. It came to the point where she wouldn’t take a step without the small notebook that hung around her neck, her pen in hand.
A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me Page 20