5
Hassan arrived back from Tetuan. He’d been to the local office of the education ministry, to sort out the problem about his readmission to the Institute. We started hanging out with five or six of the Zailachi boys in Mr Abdullah’s café. They were all students at the Institute. Some of them were lucky – they had scholarships. The rest had no grants at all. At the end of each week, some of them got food parcels from their families; the rest went home for the weekend.
Hassan had no kind of support from his family. He and his brothers had bankrupted their father’s business years ago, and they’d shared out between them what remained after his death. Hassan had the idea of buying small items from local wholesalers – reels of thread, needles, boxes of chocolate and so on – and he went round selling them to the small shops, in the Kubaybat and elsewhere. I went with him once. He’d bought some reels of thread from a Jewish trader, and then went on to sell them to a Moroccan shop just a few yards down the road at twice the price he’d paid for them.
We smoked kif because it was cheaper than cigarettes and more powerful. I was pretty much dependent on the customers in the café, all of whom were poor like us. They helped me with my homework and taught me extra bits about the subjects I was studying. Hassan taught me the art of putting basic sentences together. It was heavy going, but he never complained. I was doing good work in my written pieces, but I knew that I was making a lot of mistakes. When I asked him to explain the rules of grammar, he said:
‘Don’t worry about the case endings for the nominative and the accusative and so on. The most important thing is to learn the basics of reading and writing. Even people who know all the rules of grammar make mistakes when they’re reading and writing, so don’t bother about it too much.’
I wondered at the time whether Hassan was telling the truth, or whether he was just covering up the fact that he knew nothing about grammar. Later I discovered that what he said was true.
Miloudi helped me in checking through my Spanish, which he knew better than Arabic. He was one of the laziest students in the Institute and also the heaviest kif smoker among us.
I was permanently hungry. The hunger pangs were worst in the evening – I felt the effects in a general slowness and confusion, and a heavy beating of my heart. The school food at lunchtime was never enough to last me till nightfall. Smoking the kif only made me hungrier, but on the other hand it helped to anaesthetize my fears and anxieties. In the mornings I was often late for the school breakfast because I’d overslept. Because I was cold and hungry, and because I was scratching my dirty skin and my hair, I often found it hard to get to sleep at night. When the night of the lucky ones ended – the ones who’d been out for the evening – that was when my night began. Usually some of my fellow students kept back pieces of bread for me, and I lived on bread and water, because I had nothing else to eat.
The journey between the school and the town centre was a good quarter of an hour’s walk. On winter days, it was horribly depressing. In the evenings I went to a charitable refuge – another fifteen-minute walk. I wasn’t officially registered for eating in the canteen there, but the beadle had taken pity on me. He used to give me small pieces of bread dipped in gravy, or with a slice of meat, a piece of fat or a fried sardine. Sometimes it rained on my return route and the only available shelter was under a tree, but the drips from its branches just made me even wetter. Sometimes the beadle wasn’t there, so I’d have to go away hungrier than ever, cursing anyone I saw eating.
Once I went to the refuge at Friday lunchtime. Now, couscous is a food I’ve never liked, and I usually try to avoid it – probably because this was what the mourners had eaten (with tripe) after my uncle’s funeral in the Rif, during the days of famine. I was seven at the time. On this particular occasion the beadle asked me to join the other hostel residents for lunch, so I found myself sitting at a table with four old people. The sight of their senility and decrepitude filled me with disgust, although, to be honest, they were more deserving of pity: one of them had an eye missing; another was dribbling; another had no teeth; and the fourth had hands that trembled and shook. Not to mention various other disabilities. I felt that their deformities somehow reflected on me. That was the first and last time that I ate there.
It was couscous for lunch. The four old people looked at me as they devoured their food greedily and noisily. I was overcome with a sense of shame, I suppose because I wasn’t actually suffering from physical disabilities myself. The server put a plate in front of me. I ate the vegetables quickly, but I didn’t touch the couscous, or the strip of meat, which was tough and rubbery and not cut up like in the school canteen. The others chewed and chewed, and finally swallowed the meat. I wondered how they could ever hope to digest it. I got out my handkerchief and, pretending to wipe my mouth, spat the rubbery lump into it. The beadle gave me a piece of plain bread for my supper, and I left.
My stomach was heaving so much that I almost threw up before I reached the front door. On the way back to town I couldn’t stop thinking about their faces. They looked more like cavemen. Ugly and deformed. The thought of them disgusted me. I felt cramps in my stomach. I went over to a tree and spewed the entire contents of my guts, vomiting it up until all I had left to vomit was air. My eyes were watering and I felt dizzy. I sat and rested for a while before setting off again. Luckily, that evening Salahami was kind enough to give me a bit of fish to put into the piece of bread the beadle had given me.
My longings for my cursed Tangier were making me miserable. Even the worst of situations there would be better than what I was living here. It was a strange fact, but no sooner had I left Tangier – heartily sick of it – than I’d become obsessed with a longing for it.
My clothes were scruffy and dirty, and I knew that I smelt bad. I had lice nesting in my clothes. My shoes were letting in water. My hair was dirty and sticky, and had grown long. It was so itchy that I was forever scratching my head. One day, as I sat and scratched, I noticed something small and black under one of my nails. I combed my hair forwards to clean out the dust and scurf, and the combing produced a lively black louse. Each combing produced three or four more of the plump little creatures. They were pretty energetic, so I poked them with a twig to see if I could get them to race each other. Then I wrapped them in a scrap of paper and set fire to them to amuse myself with the popping sound as they burned.
6
I stayed in the café till it closed at around midnight. Then I roamed the streets waiting for Bab Allah (the big mosque) to open for the dawn prayers. When the mosque opened, I went in, found a damp-smelling mat in one corner and curled up on it – no chance of sleeping, though. I kept being woken up by the people coming in to pray. In the end the mosque attendant came over to me and said:
‘This isn’t a flop-house. It’s a place of prayer and worship.’
I pleaded with him to leave me alone. When he persisted, I started shouting at him, cursing his mother and his whole family, and then went out into the alley again, my shoes in my hand. It was still early morning. I’d just found myself a corner next to a building where I could curl up and sleep when all of a sudden I felt someone stumble and fall on top of me. I cursed angrily. It turned out to be the blind mukhtar, Haddad.
I’d heard of him. He’d studied at the Religious Institute and he had a reputation as a brilliant student, particularly in the Arabic tradition and its origins. He’d memorized the Koran and the hadith, as well as a lot of Arabic poetry, both sacred and secular.
He started apologizing profusely. I sat him down next to me and told him not to worry about it. I was still very sleepy, but his presence overcame my desire to sleep. When he heard I was studying at the Institute, he pulled out a book from beneath his woollen djellaba – The Tears of the Three Lovers by Zaki Mubarak. He suggested that we went together to the Café Central, saying that he’d treat me to breakfast and we could read the book together. It was Sunday. As we sat there outside the mosque, I told him a little about my life an
d the circumstances that had led me to start college in Larache. We became friends there and then. At every word which either of us said, he would let out a long sigh. He was poor too, but he wasn’t a homeless orphan like myself. He wasn’t forever having slanging matches with his father. He had an elder brother, who supported the family, and a younger brother who was studying. I think God must have been pleased with our encounter. Several times the mukhtar declared to me, in good Arabic:
‘Things are hard now, but they’ll get easier as you go along …’
He was amazingly clever at finding his way round the streets and pavements. When we needed to cross the road, he’d stop me at the kerb and glance left and right, as if it was him leading me, and not the other way round. Then he’d say:
‘Alright, we can cross now …’
He actually saw with his ears. I let him carry on as usual, as if he was on his own. We bought shurus and then we went to the Café Central. After we’d had breakfast, I settled down and began reading from The Tears of the Three Lovers. If I found a word too hard to pronounce, he encouraged me to read it carefully, getting me to repeat it several times. He explained:
‘Arabic is basically a phonetic language.’
Here I’m talking about 1957 – years later, in the 1980s, I found myself reading a book entitled Arabs are a Phonetic Phenomenon.
He could handle grammar and knew how to conjugate all the difficult verbs. This was the kind of man I wanted for a teacher. To hell with teachers who have no patience for teaching!
At that time I was reading anything I could lay my hands on: books that I’d bought or borrowed; and any item of printed matter that I happened to find on the ground. Mostly in Spanish. I developed a passion for reading. I’d even copy down the signs over shops and cafés. I’d write them on scraps of paper or in my notebook. They were mostly in Spanish too. I was more than ready to learn, even though I could have wished for better circumstances.
Rimbaud was right when he said:
‘It’s not healthy to go wearing out your trousers on a school bench, studying.’
Wise words!
Reading and writing had become a sleeping and waking obsession with me. Sometimes I imagined myself as a big letter or as a pen. On occasion I didn’t have the price of a new exercise book, so I picked up paper off the street and wrote my lessons on that. Sometimes it was paper which previously had shurus wrapped in it and the writing would disappear in patches of grease … words arranged strangely, here and there. I used to enjoy the way these patterns appeared on the sheet. My dirtiness and my hunger made me forget about bodily pleasures, as if they were now a thing of the past. God, what a miserable way to spend your time!
In the elementary class we had a young teacher, whose job it was to teach us Arabic. He fancied himself. He spent more time worrying about his looks than about what he was supposed to be teaching us. He’d parade between the rows of desks as if, in his mind’s eye, he was walking in the street, eyeing up the girls. From time to time he would pause to straighten the knot of his tie in the reflection from the window. If the window wasn’t open, he’d open it. He’d often tell us jokes or ask one of us to tell a joke. He laughed at the stupidest things. He was in the habit of pulling out a book or a newspaper and reading it in class, and sometimes he’d ask us to do our classwork in silence so as not to disturb his reading. I used to wonder about this beardless brown monkey – was he there to teach us or to study us?
He had a flaming temper, too, and if any of us made the slightest mistake, he’d start ranting at us. In his opinion, we were all donkeys and he was riding us, with the aid of his superior knowledge and the cane that he kept lying on his desk. He’d hit anyone who made him angry. His victims would cringe and hop about, and then return to their seats in tears. He took a particular dislike to me and amused himself making fun of my weaknesses in Arabic. Once, I’d been supposed to learn a poem off by heart, but I hadn’t done it. It was by Safieddin el Huli, and began with these lines:
Travel, because you will always find a replacement for what you have left behind.
And do something. The good thing about life is to be doing things.
I have seen that stillness spoils water. Running water tastes good, while standing water does not.
He came across to me angrily and lashed my shoulder three times with his thin cane. At the third blow, the tip of the cane caught my left ear. He was picking on me in particular because I was older than the other boys in the class. He ended his angry ape-like outburst with these words:
‘Idiot … Donkey … Don’t you want to study? Why don’t you just go back to Tangier with your market friends instead of wasting your time here, and us wasting our time on you?’
However, that was the only time he actually hit me. After that he confined himself to insulting me, until in the end he seemed to forget that I was there. I reached up and felt the blood on my ear. There was a loathing in the eyes of my classmates. They were on my side. I thought of pouncing on him and fighting him, as I used to in Tetuan or Tangier, even if I was the one who came off worse. I imagined us fighting until one of us gave up, and me biting one of his stupid donkey ears off and spitting it in his face. But I didn’t want to be thrown out of the school. So I’d leave his donkey ears for some other donkey to bite. When the lesson ended, I went to the toilets and rinsed the dried blood from my ear. Drops of blood had fallen onto my shoulder. As I washed my ear, the blood began flowing again.
We had another teacher – the one who’d given me the maths test on my first day at the school. He had a foul temper, just like the other teacher, and he used to call us donkeys too. He always carried a couple of books with him, usually in a foreign language. I heard that he was studying English by correspondence and that he spoke Spanish and a little French. He taught us maths, history and geography. He used to cane us too, on our fingertips, and sometimes he’d hit us. But on the other hand he was fair, in the sense that he never ended a lesson without talking things over with the person he’d punished. We didn’t despise him in the same way that we despised his colleague. In fact he actually went out of his way to help some of the poorer pupils from the countryside with money and clothing, and he’d visit them in their homes to make sure they were alright. However his compassion and his concern outside school didn’t extend to me.
I had no place to live and no place to sleep. At night I used to hang out with the drunks and the hash smokers and the nightwalkers. There was always a place for me with them. They were like each other and they helped each other, wherever they were, at any time and in any place. But if anyone wasn’t prepared to share their way of life, then they rejected them.
I was slowly beginning to be able to read and understand ‘the world’s symbols’. Eventually I passed the entry exam for secondary school. During the maths exam I cheated by copying from another pupil. Somebody told me that some of the students got through by bribery or by using influence, so I felt justified in doing a bit of cheating myself. Once school was over, the restaurant owner Salahami gave me the price of a bus ticket and I returned to Tangier. My cursed city! Yet I still loved it, even after all that time.
7
El Murwani came to the Café Ballerina as usual, except that on this particular day he wasn’t carrying the large tray filled with the flat, Pakistani-style loaves that he usually sold round the popular cafés. This time he was only carrying rolls, spread with butter and honey. As he ate his breakfast, he started ranting that ‘certain people’ had been talking about him behind his back, accusing him of being a traitor to his country. He finished his breakfast, and then began shouting in an angry voice:
‘I’ll show them, today … I’ll show them who’s a so-called agent of imperialism …!’
The other customers looked at each other nervously because they could see the craziness in his eyes. He took out a cigarette and smoked it, looking extremely agitated. Then, from under his white flowing gown, he suddenly produced a large knife. The customers froze. Their
faces twitched imperceptibly as they sat glued to their seats. He glared round the café. All eyes were on him and nobody dared so much as blink.
‘Today the bastards are going to find out who I really am!’
He put the knife back in his belt and went running out in the direction of ‘Aqbat el Siyaghin. In Plaza Benito Pérez Galdós1 he pulled the knife out and used it to stab a Jewish money-changer in his shop. Then he stabbed a woman tourist. He ran down Tariq el Touahin waving the knife, which by now was dripping with blood. He ran into some Moroccans, but chose to ignore them. As he went, people heard him yelling:
‘Holy war, in the name of Allah! You bastards! The curse of Allah on all infidels and unbelievers …!’
Arriving in Houmat Bencharqi, he made a beeline for one particular shop. It was shut, so he started kicking at the door and shouting abusive things about its owner. Then he ran off again. In Calle Dar Debagh he attacked a number of foreign tourists. Then he ran down Avenida de España, near the railway station. A Spanish policeman was on the street. El Murwani ran towards him, brandishing his knife. The policeman saw him coming, pulled out his gun and fired at his legs. El Murwani fell. As he rolled about, with blood running from one leg, he was still cursing ‘the bastards’. An ambulance arrived, together with a police jeep, and a crowd of bystanders gathered to watch.
1. A famous Spanish writer (1843–1920).
8
I was sitting out in front of the Café Central – the heat was making me sleepy – when I saw her coming up from Tariq el Bahriya. She looked like she’d been moulded into her white, diaphanous blouse and the trousers that clung to her slender body. Young and beautiful, she was. A blonde. A flirtatiousness in the way she walked. A small, slightly snub nose, her hair long and sleek, and her upper lip arched. Her eyes large and inviting. She had the look of a quarrelsome cat. An Asiatic cat.
Streetwise Page 3