The march came to a halt in front of the pasha’s house, and a loud cheer went up:
‘Come out and give yourselves up!’
There was a burst of gunfire from one of the windows of the house.3 Somebody was firing into the air. The crowd retreated at a run, but then a voice shouted:
‘Don’t be afraid. They’re only trying to scare us!’
One of the new government’s supporters had a revolver and another was carrying an old shotgun. They went up into a couple of houses opposite the pasha’s house and began shooting back. People scattered and fled, but soon crept back again. A contingent of Spanish soldiers came and lined up on the pavement near the pasha’s house, with a captain in charge. Somebody said:
‘They’re scared. They’ve got no authority to use firearms on us. They’re just trying to frighten us. We’ll burn them out …!’
People arrived carrying a can of petrol. They used it to set fire to the pasha’s garage. The shooting from the pasha’s house stopped and a door opened. There stood the pasha’s manservant, with his gun raised above his head. He was a black man. The mob began shouting:
‘Rabeh! Rabeh! It’s Rabeh!’
The captain in charge of the Spanish soldiers tried to stop the crowd from attacking the pasha’s servant, but by now they were going wild. They pounced on him. Rabeh threw his gun to the ground, in a gesture of surrender. He already had blood on his face. Not a sound came from his lips. They buried their nails into his flesh and tore at his clothing. They leapt on him with clubs. He staggered under the weight of their wild, brutish blows until finally he collapsed. An army of people fell on him, hacking at him with whatever came to hand. They dragged him down to the street. The women were shrieking with joy. The children were rushing around, yelling with excitement. One man stepped out of the crowd, and it was as if he had all the mob’s craziness concentrated inside him. He smashed a bottle of petrol over Rabeh’s head. Another man soaked the end of a stick in petrol, set fire to it and threw it onto him. The crowd was going wild with excitement in this primal ritual celebration. Amid the sounds of rejoicing, angry voices were shouting at their victim:
‘Die, you dirty dog …’
‘Die, you bastard …’
‘Die, dog! Die, dog!’
As he rolled and writhed on the ground, his body burned like a kind of terrible flaming torch. Then he lay still. There was a nauseating smell of burning human flesh. A charred, mangled lump of humanity. They hacked at it with knives and cleavers, and even tore at it with their nails. A woman snatched up one of the leg bones, which still had some flesh on it. She bit into it dementedly and then wrapped it in a piece of cloth that she’d torn from her clothes. Slipping the bundle under her arm, she disappeared.
‘What’s she going to do with it?’
‘She’ll use it to put a spell on her husband, to stop him beating her, or divorcing her, or running off with other women. That’s what they’re saying.’
Within a few minutes all that was left of the body was a few charred remains and a gut-wrenching smell of burnt human flesh. Then they went into the house and began dragging out furniture and piling it up in the street. They set fire to some of the furniture and the pasha’s paperwork. Burning and looting. The government men seemed alarmed at this and shouted:
‘Don’t burn the books. We’ll take them to party headquarters.’4
By this time clouds of smoke were billowing out of the house. The ululations of the women demonstrators and the shouts of excited children echoed round about. The town’s Spanish inhabitants were watching all this from the windows and balconies of their homes, in silence. The Spanish soldiers stayed put, not moving off the pavement.
Then some of the demonstrators ran off, splitting up into groups as they went. Their chosen targets were the houses of various of the pasha’s agents in town. A jeep and a truck arrived and began loading what was left of the paperwork and the more valuable items of furniture that hadn’t been burned. Then the government men put a cordon across the street, to stop people stealing furniture and taking it home with them. One man was actually taking his clothes off in the street and putting on clothes from a pile that had been looted.
The mob broke into the house of one of the pasha’s agents in Calle Barcelona, but they found nobody there. Again, burning and looting. Then they continued on their rampage, storming round to the houses of anyone they suspected of being a traitor5 to the nation.
An angry mob appeared from the direction of Bab el Kubaybat. They had an old man in their clutches and were dragging him roughly along the ground, stabbing at him with knives. The old man had lost most of his clothes by this time. His eyes were starting out of his head. This mass of moving flesh had entirely lost its humanity. Somebody brought some rope and they tied him to a tree by his arms and legs in front of Bab el Kubaybat, effectively crucifying him. They tipped petrol over him and put a match to it. Again, there were shrieks and screams of joy, and people leaping in the air. The smell of burning flesh began to spread across Plaza de España. The old man’s eyes bulged out of his head and began rolling around in their sockets.
His body twitched convulsively. The Spanish woman who ran the wine shop next to Bab el Kubaybat, directly opposite the scene of the crucifixion, screamed:
‘My God …! No! No! No …!’
Then she passed out. They say that she died of a heart attack.
That night the streets were deserted except for a group of soldiers collecting up the remnants of what had been looted from the pasha’s house and the houses of his agents. Two vehicles pulled up next to the tree: a police car and an ambulance. The ambulance men wore masks and rubber gloves. They gathered up the last remaining fragments of flesh and bone and put them in a box, while the police guarded the rest of the square. They sprayed a kind of powder on the ground and on the charred remains of the tree – it filled the square with a vile, choking smell. But the smell of human flesh proved stronger and lingered in people’s nostrils.
1. The pasha was an agent of Spanish colonialism.
2. In Tangier, in the period immediately after Independence, some of the supporters of the new regime took to wearing military-style uniforms. Some had complete uniforms, while others only had single items, such as caps, jackets or trousers. Depending on what they could lay their hands on, they wore air force, army or navy uniforms, with officer’s insignia and bearing the Moroccan national flag. The uniforms were often acquired from sailors on US warships in exchange for traditional Moroccan handicrafts. The authorities did nothing to prevent this happening. All kinds of things were permitted in that period.
3. In the end it turned out that the only person actually in the house was Rabeh, who was well known in town as the pasha’s servant. People had thought that the pasha was still in the house, but they later discovered that he had fled to Spain, with his Spanish wife, via Tetuan and Sebta, under the protection of the Spanish authorities (a protection which extended to cutting telephone comunications between Larache and Tetuan on the day in question).
4. The Independence Party.
5. On this particular day, it was enough for one of the demonstrators to accuse someone of treason for that person to be burned. The old man who was burned at the stake (Sharif el Soumati) had been the headman of the village of Qiryat Khamis el Saahil. It was later claimed that one of the demonstrators had owed him money and, since he couldn’t afford to pay, had used this as a way of getting rid of him.
3
On my first day at the new school, the headmaster escorted me into the classroom and introduced me to the teacher:
‘Mr Mohamed, this is the young man who will be studying with you.’
They stepped outside the door for a moment, to talk about something – presumably about me. I’m convinced that the headmaster put me into that class in order to test me. If I didn’t make the grade, after a few days he’d be telling me:
‘You don’t seem to be cut out for studying here. It’d be better for you to return
to Tangier.’
The other pupils started whispering together and looking me up and down. I felt very peculiar standing there in front of them. I’d never been in front of forty people before, all of them examining me from head to toe. The pupils in the class were all about my age, but they already knew how to read and write. There was a written lesson on the blackboard, and they had their exercise books open in front of them. I later discovered that most of them were country kids.
The teacher came back into the room and sat me in the middle row, next to the smallest boy in the class. There were three rows of seats in the classroom. In the front row, just to my right, there were four plump girl pupils.
The teacher said:
‘This is a new arrival in the class. I want you to help him settle in.’
They carried on staring at me, whispering and fidgeting in their seats. The teacher rapped the desk with his ruler, and they went quiet. Most of them were wearing djellabas. They all looked as if they were short of sleep. It was easy enough to pick out the country kids from the town kids, from their faces and the way they dressed.
They were copying the written lesson from the blackboard. What on earth were they copying? In front of me sat an exercise book and a pencil, waiting for me to start my first lesson. Handwritten letters – the ‘symbols of the world’ – were slowly materializing in my deskmate’s book, but my pages stayed obstinately blank. I stared at my classmates, impressed by their handwriting. Would the headmaster let me learn to write like that? If he didn’t, then I’d have no choice but to return to live a life of professional depravity in Tangier, never having learned how to interpret what happens in this world by means of its symbols. Since I’d come this far, I was determined to learn. In Tangier somebody had once told me, ‘True life is always to be found in books.’
The teacher strolled slowly round the class, looking at some of the kids’ classwork, until he arrived at my desk. A calm, friendly man, who presumably didn’t spend his time hanging out with street kids. He leaned over my exercise book and wrote some words on the second page, each word on a separate line, and quietly pronounced each of the words in turn. Then he asked me to copy the words until each line was full. My small, timid deskmate kept glancing across at me, and at the feeble handwriting in my exercise book, as I struggled with the words. My hand was trembling with the effort of all this writing, but the fact that he was watching me meant that I tried not to shake so much. By now I’d filled three whole lines. I folded my arms and watched the teacher walking between the rows, and then I looked at the others copying out their lesson. Some of them had finished already. The teacher came over to see what I had written:
‘Good! You’ll soon get the hang of this, God willing.’
Then he asked my deskmate to write out more words for me, which he did. The rest of the class were still whispering and muttering about me, but the teacher stood up and surveyed them with a stern expression. They all fell silent. I could tell by the look on my friend’s face that he was happy – certainly happier than I was … Compared with the rest of them, I felt horribly inferior. The only alphabet I knew was the few letters that Hamid had taught me in Tangier. I felt wretched and guilty, as if I had no right to be there. I had come from a clan of pimps, thieves, smugglers and prostitutes. I felt as if I was in a sacred place, defiling it by my presence – even though, as it turned out, a lot of these kids came from the same kind of sordid background as me. I was depressed and I wrestled with whether I should stay there or return to Tangier. But I knew that Tangier was no bed of roses and that staying at the school would be better for me in the long run.
My deskmate wrote out more words for me, pronouncing each of them in a low voice, just as the teacher had done. I thanked him. My hand trembled again as I settled down to work, trying to copy his neat handwriting. From that moment on, I found that I was learning more from my fellow students than from the teachers.
4
There was always a mad scramble to get the best places in the dining hall. The teachers would take it in turns to supervise us at breakfast and lunch, doing one week at a time. The girls always lined up and went in before us. They weren’t what you’d call good-looking, but one of them wasn’t bad. Their giggling and whispering mingled with the clatter of spoons and dishes. The teacher on lunch duty would patrol up and down inside the dining room. Occasionally he’d go and stand outside the door, turning his back on us and staring out into the empty space of the schoolyard. This was the signal for the noise to start, echoing round the hall, until eventually the teacher would come back in and start shouting at us:
‘Any of you donkeys … who don’t want to keep quiet and eat … can leave the hall right now!’
Then he’d go back to smoking his cigarette in the doorway. This was the same unpleasant teacher who’d tested me in arithmetic on my first day.
The mark of poverty was written on all our faces. We had nothing more than our humanity and the clothes we stood up in. Maybe once the girls grew up and got settled, they’d be beautiful, who knows!
The first course was usually lentils, and we’d find it waiting for us on the tables. There were usually flies in the food, sometimes alive and sometimes dead, and you’d have to pick them out before you could start eating. Some of the kids thought that the flies had a germ in one wing, and something to kill the germs in their other wing, and that explained why they’d sometimes crash-land in your dinner. They invented these kinds of stories to make up for their wretched lives.
I deliberately used to sit at the end of the hall because that gave me a chance to steal pieces of bread from the tables in the first row. There was never enough food for us older boys. We even went round picking up crumbs. If any of the pupils were feeling ill, whether they were there or not, we took advantage of their loss of appetite to grab their portions. We always ate the first course warily because there were usually bits of grit in it. I remember one of the boys chewing on a splinter of glass in a bowl of rice and ending up spitting blood. The second course was usually fried egg, fish in a tomato sauce, or pieces of so-called meat. The meat was usually rubbery or rock solid, and we were always scared to swallow it in case it got stuck in our throats. Usually we’d just chew it as best we could, suck out the juices and then spit it out. The main ingredients of every school meal were lentils and greens.
Once I went and caught four flies outside the school. I wrapped them in a piece of paper, intending to drop them into the plates of other kids sitting next to me. Sometimes I even went hunting for flies in the toilets – after all, there’s no such thing as a clean fly or a dirty fly. When I was dropping these flies into other people’s bowls, I had to make sure that the teacher didn’t see me. Some of my fellow pupils saw me, but they didn’t tell on me.
However, the teacher did catch me stealing a piece of bread. He hit me and barred me from the dining hall for three days. The other kids stuck by me, and brought me out slices of bread and bits of fish and meat from their own meals. This teacher was a stickler for the rules – there wasn’t much compassion in him.
Because we were poor, we respected each other and we stuck together. Almost all of us knew the experience of poverty – a poverty which our exploiters considered a normal, natural fact of life.
After all the battling over lunch, I generally fancied a sleep to make up for what I’d missed out on during the night. There was a concrete bench outside, butting up against one wall of the school, and that was where I slept. Sometimes I slept so soundly that I missed a lesson or even a whole afternoon.
Near the school lived a cripple who was better at maths than any of the students. He was probably better than some of the teachers too, according to what I’d heard. He’d dropped out of junior school and hadn’t taken the entrance exam for secondary school. His mother had died, and his father had left town years ago and never returned. Not so much as a word as to his whereabouts. He’d left his crippled son in the care of a maternal aunt, who was deaf and dumb, and who earned her liv
ing by searching through rubbish piles early in the morning and by begging at the bus station.
The cripple used to help the students with their maths homework. The kids would cluster round him, putting their questions, and he would show them various ways of solving their problems. In return for his help with their homework, they gave him a few coins, or single cigarettes, or food, or whatever they had. Sometimes they’d organize a sweepstake among themselves, on the answer to one of the problems. The winner would share the takings with the cripple. Even though he was always helping like this, he never asked for anything in return. When luck brought a few pesetas my way, I used to buy him Virginia cigarettes because he preferred them to black tobacco. I bought them from the street sellers in town, who sold them singly if you asked them.
There was a Christian graveyard nearby and I used to enjoy sitting in it. I used to wander around between the rows of graves. I enjoyed reading the names and trying to decipher the words on the tombstones, even the ones I couldn’t understand. I don’t know what it is that attracts me to graveyards. Is it the atmosphere of peace and calm? Or is it a habit left over from the days when I used to sleep in graveyards? Or is it perhaps a craving for death?1
I used to enjoy going out to a field not far from the school. I’d lie in the shade of a tree smoking dog-ends that I’d picked up in town, since I was completely broke. I used to lie there watching the passing clouds and imagining them as splendid mythical creatures. Or I’d recall the best of the good times in Tangier: memories of thighs, and women’s bellies, and beautiful breasts, and then I’d masturbate. This flood of memories would send me off to sleep, and by the time I woke up it felt as if I’d been asleep for hours.
1. This habit has stayed with me right up to the present day. Some of my writings (including the first section of my autobiography For Bread Alone and a few chapters of this present book) were written as I sat on graves in Jewish, Christian and Moslem graveyards. My favourites are the graves that date from nineteenth-century Tangier. I find them particularly impressive.
Streetwise Page 2