She can go take a shit, he said.
She’s young and pretty.
She can still go and take a shit. In her clothes. There are plenty of others, better than that. You’ll see.
I know.
We spoke to another woman, a little older and calmer than the one who had refused us. She wasn’t ugly, but the first had been better to look at. What good is beauty, though, if it has pride with it? I thought.
How does she look to you? I asked Tafersiti.
What’s the difference? She’ll do. The main thing is that she’ll take us both.
She’s a little fat, I said.
It doesn’t matter. We can use her. Afterwards we’ll look for something better.
Too much beauty is bad for you, I said.
We tossed a coin to see which one would go first. Tafersiti drew heads. But he said: It would be better if you went first.
You’re used to it. You always go first.
I went in. ¡Antonio! she called. Trae agua y una toalla.
A handsome boy came to the doorway. Ya voy, he said. His eyelashes had kohl on them, and his face was covered with pink powder. He seemed to have breasts, and they stood out. He wore his trousers very tight.
Give him something, the woman told me. I was confused. I gave him two pesetas. Then I tried to give the woman her fifteen pesetas.
No, no. Afterwards. Are you going to run away, or what? First we make love.
She washed my sex with soap and water. She squeezed it and rolled it. Why is she doing that? I wondered. The Moroccan women don’t wash it or squeeze it.
I was unable to keep it from growing hard as she worked, and I was ashamed. She smiled, and I smiled back at her.
¿Eres fuerte, eh? she laughed.
She took off her brassiere and underpants. It was not shaved. I expected her to wash herself, too, but she lay back on the bed, one leg across the other, with her hands on her thighs. They all know that the less they show, the more interesting they are, I thought.
So she did not wash. Perhaps that was because she knew she was clean. And now, she did not grip me with her scissors, but merely lay there like a great tuna-fish. I had heard how the Prophet Jonah had been swallowed by a whale. She folded one leg under the other, and I looked between them, thinking that this was a strange position for her to take. But obligingly she let me kiss her lips. They tasted good.
Suddenly she cried: Ay! Ay! Wait! We’ve got some hairs caught in there. Take it out, and let me move. That wasn’t a good way to lie. Perhaps this will be better for you.
She changed her position, and I was afraid she was not going to let me get back in. As far as I was concerned, both positions were good. She did not mind when I touched her breasts, or when I sucked on her lower lip. Filling my mouth with one of her breasts gave me a wild desire to sink my teeth into the flesh. The hairs had caused me some pain as well. She was in no hurry to finish.
How is she? Tafersiti asked when I came out.
Fine! Wonderful! She lets you have everything. She’s clean, too, and smells of perfume.
She does?
You’ll see for yourself.
That night I dreamed I was sucking a woman’s breast. The stream of milk that shot out of it struck me violently in the face.
One day little brother Achor died. His death left me with no feeling of regret. I had heard him crying and seen him crawling, but I had never thought of him as another person.
My new pleasures kept me from being submerged by life at home. Without interest I watched my sister Khemou grow and learn to talk. I was buried in my own melancholy, intent only upon my own body and the pleasure it could give me. Each day the world seemed to become a more complicated place. I slept in the street more often than I slept at home.
My mother lent me some money. Tafersiti and I began to buy fruit and vegetables from the warehouses and sell them for our own profit in the street. When grapes came into season, we bought huge quantities of them and carried them out to sell in the country markets. This did not last very long, and we spent all we had earned in bars and brothels. When winter came we regretted our thoughtlessness.
Khemou had begun to go and sit in the street with my mother as she sold her vegetables, where she could help keep an eye on the small boys who came to steal. One afternoon Comero, the bully of the quarter, slapped her. I was smoking kif in a café when a friend came by and told me.
Comero hit your sister. He was trying to steal a head of cabbage. Your mother wasn’t there.
I went and found Khemou crying. Some boys I knew came by. He’s in the Café Bab et Toute! Why don’t you go and beat him up? You can do it. I know you can. Boras butted him in the face and knocked him out. Yes! Fight him! We’re all with you. He’ll have nobody on his side. Who’s as good as you with a razor-blade?
I bought three razor-blades and sent friends to tell Comero I would be waiting for him outside the walls. We began in the Souq el Berra with our fists. He was stronger than I was, but I managed to keep out of his reach. When I saw that he was going to win, I pulled out one of the razor-blades and began to slash his face and hands and chest. My friends and I ran off, leaving him yelling and dancing in circles.
My father’s brothers had left the Rif and gone to Oran to live, and he had been preparing to go and see them. That night, having learned of the fight, he called in some of the neighbours and got them to help him catch me. He had been going to make the trip by himself, but now he went and bought another ticket, and at one in the morning he and I boarded a bus for Nador. We got down at Ketama for some black coffee. It was the first time I had walked on snow. The voyage was tiring. We ate dry bread and hard-boiled eggs, and we crossed the River Moulouya on the shoulders of the men who always waited there to help those who did not want to face the police on the bridge. Then we walked on to a place in the road further ahead, and bought a ride on a truck going past.
We passed a night in Oujda at the house of some friends of my father’s. I spent the next morning killing the lice that crawled everywhere in my clothing.
4
It was night when we arrived in Oran. My father found a man who spoke Riffian, and he showed us to the house in the New Medina where my father’s friends lived. There the houses were built into the cliffs like caves, and dogs ran out at us, barking. One of them tore my trousers. I was walking ahead of my father while he picked up stones to throw at them. When they came nearer, he clubbed them with the stick he was carrying. He swore at the dogs and then he swore at me. Go on ahead, you coward, damn you!
I stumbled and fell. He pounded me with the stick, and I yelled. As I continued to walk ahead, he prodded me in the back. The stones under my feet were pointed, and I was walking through nettles. He hits me and curses me aloud, and I do the same to him secretly. Without my imagination I should have exploded.
A man in tattered clothing came out of one of the caves and greeted us. We went inside. His wife was on the floor praying, dressed in spotless white.
Presently the woman asked me for news of my mother and my brothers and sisters who had been born in exile, in Tangier. The only one she had seen was Abdelqader, and she was sad to hear of his death. I did not tell her how he had died. The last time I saw you, you were only five or six years old, she told me. And here it is nine years later.
The following day we met my uncle and my grandmother in Douar ej Jdid, and then we went to see my aunt in the quarter of Serimine. She had married a man from Marrakech.
You’ve grown up, my grandmother told me. Soon you’ll be a man. Then you’ll work and help me to live. Isn’t that right?
Yes. She was thin and sick.
My father left me behind with my aunt, and went on to look for his brothers in other Algerian cities far from Oran. Three months later a letter came from him saying that he had gone back to Tetuan, and that it would be better for me to stay on in Oran.
My aunt got her husband to find me a job, and soon I was working on the farm of the same French woman in wh
ose stable he worked. I was in the vineyard from five in the morning to six in the evening. The pause at midday for eating and resting lasted only an hour, but often we managed to prolong it another hour more, if nobody came by. My work consisted in guiding two mules along the ploughed tracks in the earth.
I grew tanned, and the palms of my hand became calloused. The old farm labourer under whom I worked treated me according to the way he felt at the moment. Depending on the circumstances he could be kind or heartless. I learned that his harsh words were only a way of expressing the frustration he felt at the work he was forced to do. What hurt me in his behaviour was the fact that he treated me as a peasant.
The country you come from has produced only one man, and that was Abd el Krim el Khattabi, he would tell me.
I had not yet heard of Abd el Krim, and had no idea who he was.
I continued this backbreaking work for six months. On Sundays I would go out to catch birds, or walk to the city. One day I tried in vain to climb a high tree. That leg was tall and smooth. I grew very angry at being repulsed, and so I went to the shed and filled a can with gasoline. I doused the tree trunk and lit a match. The flames were beautiful. I said to the charred tree: Now you’re not so smooth. I can climb you, as high as I want.
There was no one in sight. The place was hidden from the farmhouse and its outbuildings. The tree looked like a woman, only it was without legs, and its branches took the place of a head.
I looked for a smaller tree, and found it, smooth and bright. I discovered that when I put my arms around it, they met at the back. I cut the outline of a woman on the trunk, with head and torso, and then I began the creation. For a full week I was busy cutting out two deep holes for the breasts, as well as another even deeper one at the meeting of the legs. And so I made the tree woman. Whenever I wanted to amuse myself I fastened an orange into each breast-hole, and sucked on them. Sometimes I substituted apples, so that I could chew pieces out of them. The opening between the thighs had to be lubricated, and then I was able to transfer all the images in my memory to the tree woman.
One evening my aunt’s husband told me: Tomorrow you won’t be going to the vineyard. Madame Segundi, the foreman’s wife, wants to see you. She may let you work for her in the house. That depends on whether she likes you.
I was overjoyed. But I was troubled by his final words: If she likes you.
Madame Segundi was friendly and pleasant. She was also young and attractive, and the litheness of her body reminded me of Asiya. Sitting facing her I was humble, even timid. But it was not so in my fantasies. She would be a marvellous new toy for my dreams; it is best to change one’s dreams each day. She spoke to me in Spanish, and I tried desperately to remember the few words I still knew.
Madame Segundi gave me three days in which to prepare myself for work. I spent them at the circus, the cinema, and the cafés. I carried a bottle of wine with me wherever I went. At night I would drink it at the farm in the small hut that stood alongside my uncle’s house. The only one to witness my nocturnal pleasures was Tigre, the dog.
My pretty mistress taught me how to wash dishes and dry them, and how to fry eggs and fish. One day I cooked her a Moroccan tajine, and she was delighted with it. She got into the habit of asking for it each week. Today we’ll have your Moroccan food. But you’ve got to make it by yourself.
I enjoyed working for her, and I used her as a dream object whenever I felt excited. I had begun to miss the whores of Tetuan. Slow or fast, kissing lips and breasts, or only the cheeks, neck and shoulders, it did not matter. But in Oran, although I had heard about them, I had no idea how to find the brothels. Even if I had known where they were, I could not have gone alone. I should have needed a friend to take me. The friends I had there in Oran were all very serious-minded. It would have been unthinkable for me to mention my desires to anyone at the farm. How could I have brought up the subject, when not one of them ever smiled? Sometimes I watched Monsieur Segundi kiss his beautiful wife and lightly run his hands over her body. He did not mind doing it in front of me. Usually I served them their breakfast in bed, he bare-chested, and she in her transparent nightgown that showed her nipples, like two raisins, underneath. Even to think of the space between them filled my mouth with saliva and made my senses begin to blur.
One day she asked me to wash her husband’s underwear. As I plunged the garments into the water I thought: What is this? One man shouldn’t be washing another man’s underwear. Then I said to Monique, my mistress: No. I’m not going to wash these clothes.
Why not?
These are Monsieur Segundi’s shorts.
And so?
I hung my head and said: A man doesn’t wash another man’s underwear.
She laughed. And what about women’s underwear?
I hesitated, and then told her: Women’s clothes are different. A man can wash them for her if she can’t do it herself.
You’re very funny, she said. You’re marvellous! Is that the custom in Morocco?
I was not certain whether it was a true custom, or only one which I had just invented. There was no precedent for it in my experience. But I said: Yes. That’s our custom in Morocco.
It’s very strange, she said.
They laughed together about it, she and her husband. A few days later it was Monsieur Segundi himself who ordered me to wash his underpants. I said no. He insisted, and I continued to refuse.
What do you mean, you won’t wash them? he demanded.
That’s what I mean.
Then go home and stay there!
Three days later I was sent back to work by my relatives, who had the Segundis’ approval. My mistress’s parents came from Sidi bel Abbès to visit her, and her father talked with me about his Spanish origins. He pitied me, he said, for not being able to read or write in any language, and he asked me if they did not teach either Arabic or Spanish in Tetuan.
Yes, I’ve heard they teach both Arabic and Spanish, I said.
They why didn’t you go to school?
Because my father never thought of sending me.
Was it that he didn’t send you, or that you didn’t want to go?
I don’t know, I said. But he didn’t ever take me to any school.
He looked for a moment at my forehead. How did you get that scar?
I was crossing the street and there was a bicycle race going on, I told him.
I wondered later why some men were so much nicer than my father.
The summer afternoons in Oran are fine and long. The old men play checkers. The young ones fence with wooden swords. The women are inside, or talking in their doorways. The children are everywhere, playing games and fashioning toys out of clay and pieces of wood or cane.
I went to Sidi bel Abbès with my employers. All the members of Madame Segundi’s family were good to me, but it was her father who seemed particularly to like me. I took a walk in the town. It was sad and sinister, although I liked the main avenue and the cathedral. I heard a lot of Spanish being spoken in the streets. People passed by me on all sides, but there was no question of speaking to any of them, nor did they speak to me. I was among them, but far from them. I came to a street fair. The circus spectacle began at five, and so I could not see it. I had to be back at the Segundis’ house before that. I smoked one cigarette after the other, and drank two glasses of wine in a Spanish bar. Then I went to look at the circus animals in their cages. I stopped in front of a monkey. There were some children beside its cage, and they were teasing it. I have no idea how it happened, but suddenly I felt the monkey’s claws tearing my face. I yelled and jumped back. The guard came and chased the children away. Then he looked at my scratches and patted my shoulder, shouting again at the fleeing children.
I saw something which made me forget the pain in my face for a moment: a young couple embracing behind the circus tent, all shining in their satin costumes. Watching their kisses awoke all my senses. I thought how wonderful circus life must be. And I remembered the orchard at Aïn Khabbè
s, Asiya undressing, I sliding on Fatima’s naked body, and the whores at the brothel in Tetuan who had opened their thighs to me.
When I got back to the house they painted my face with iodine. They seemed to think the scratches were important. Madame Segundi’s aunt took care of me, and let me go for a walk in her garden. Spiders’ webs covered all the plants. Under the dome of the summerhouse I noticed two dusty wooden benches half eaten away by termites. The sight filled me with profound melancholy. The garden was lugubrious. Pieces of broken objects were scattered here and there among the plants. From time to time in the trees above a bird sang briefly or fluttered its wings. Lime spattered on my head and shoulders.
We drove back to Oran. The next day the scratches on my face had turned black. When Sunday came, my employers did not take me with them when they went for their usual ride. I stayed behind alone in the house.
I turned on the radio for a moment. Then I shut it off and began to play the phonograph. I did not understand the words being sung on the records, but the music and the voices took me off to a world that I saw all in bluish-green. My mistress Monique knew I liked ‘The Blue Danube’. When she is feeling in unusually good spirits she will say: I’m going to put on your record.
I took up the photograph album and looked through the family pictures. There were some snapshots of Monique when she was a little girl. I spoke to them: Grow up! Grow up right away! As I turned the pages, she did grow up. I studied the pictures taken at the beach, where she was coming out of the water, or lying on the sand with her husband, or alone. There are three colour photographs of her where she is completely naked. In the first she is standing, leaning forward a little, with her hands folded below her belly. In the next she is kneeling on a fur-covered divan, bust erect, arms straight out behind her. I imagined her asking me: Do you like this pose? And I answered: Beautiful! Marvellous! In the third picture she is lying back on the couch, her hands behind her head, one leg slightly turned outward. Come on, said the picture. You’re mine, I told the silent woman, and I wondered who could have taken such pictures of her. Her husband, probably. If I had had a camera that morning long ago, I could have photographed Asiya coming towards the tank, bathing naked, searching frantically for her pyjamas, and running away through the orchard in fright.
For Bread Alone Page 4