Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  I wanted her, but I needed to know if she was available, so I followed her. By now I was awake and fully alert.

  She turned into Calle Curro Las Once and then went into a house on the square. My suspicions proved to be well-founded: she was a prostitute. I waited till she went upstairs. The lady of the house received me with a smile. This was Lala Ghaliya – a fine woman. She was getting on a bit, but she was still elegant and full of life. Her establishment had an air of something special. Dar Es Salaam, it was called – the House of Peace. From one of the rooms I could hear the sound of laughter and people talking and shouting.

  She took me into a small room furnished with nothing much except a Moroccan couch. The smell of incense was everywhere. On the walls hung rugs with scenes from the Arabian Nights. I ordered a beer. It was brought by a pretty brunette, short and plump, in a white and purple skirt. She leaned over as she put the bottle on the small table next to me and because her skirt was translucent I could see the strong outline of her thighs in the light of the sun. I thanked her, and she turned and smiled at me.

  Lala Ghaliya came and looked in through the door, her tall figure breaking the light of the sun’s rays. She greeted me with a radiant smile, cigarette in hand, and then came swishing in, in her brightly coloured caftan. I ordered a second beer before I’d finished the first and asked about the girl in the white blouse and trousers. She told me that the price of a night with one of the girls would be 50 pesetas, and I said that was fine. She then brought me a third beer before I’d finished the second. She said that the particular girl I wanted was occupied for the moment. I said I’d be happy to wait. She told me she had two other girls, who were more beautiful. I said I’d leave the choice to her. She called out ‘Rabi’a!’ and the girl who came in was the pretty brunette who’d brought my beer. We had another couple of beers while she told me she was from Meknes. I said I’d never visited her town. We took our drinks to another room, which had a bed in it. I asked her about the girl I’d wanted originally, the one with the white blouse and trousers. She told me she was from Tangier. Rabi’a’s scent was strong and passionate, and so was she.

  That evening I spent my time round the wine shops in the Inner Souq. Everyone was talking about the craziness of el Murwani, and his rampage, and his family, and the way madness can be inherited, and about colonialism and how it chooses its agents among people with a disadvantage or a chip on their shoulder, who generally end up as criminals.

  As drink began to get the better of me, I became more and more determined. I returned to the brothel and spoke with the procuress Shariouta. She said that the girl – her name was Kunza – was still occupied with other men, and that if I wanted her I’d best come back the following day. Or, if I preferred, she had others who were more beautiful than her.

  I told her that Kunza was the one I wanted and I was prepared to pay up to 100 pesetas. She said she’d talk to her. I told her that if she could arrange it, there’d be something in it for her too. At that point Kunza appeared in the reception room, walking proud, like a tigress sated on her prey. Then she disappeared again into the inner sanctum. Shariouta brought me my beer and told me:

  ‘If you take my advice, you won’t bother with her. She’s the stubborn sort, and unfortunately I can’t give her the good knockabout she deserves. Women are stronger than men and this is their time – when men want them. Come back another day. Maybe Allah will show her the right way.’

  The following morning I was selling counterfeit watches in the harbour. A decent morning’s work – I’d earned myself 30 dollars. In the evening I met Hamid Zailachi skulking round the alleys of the Inner Souq. Apparently he’d come out of prison two days previously. His head was shaved and he was wearing a black, threadbare beret. He looked pale and tense.

  ‘They put me in a cell that stank to high heaven – it had rats coming out of the toilet hole. They kept me in there for three days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I refused to clean the toilets. I told them I was sick. The guard had it in for me because I had nothing to bribe him with. That’s the usual way you get out of cleaning toilets in prison. I’d gone into the Café Normandie for a drink. They refused to serve me, so I went and pissed on the doorstep. The waiters grabbed me and marched me off to the police. I got a month for it.’

  Hamid had begun to think about going back to studying in Larache – if he didn’t end up going back to prison because of his wicked ways, picking people’s pockets. He was good at it, but he knew that one careless move could see him back behind bars again.

  ‘I don’t want to end my life among that kind of people. The ones who pass sentence on you in prison are more vicious than the judges who pass sentence on the outside. Give me the judgement of the judges, any day, and not the judgement of the judged!’

  I told him what had happened to me with Kunza.

  ‘She obviously knows you’ve fallen for her and she’s trying to trap you. You should keep away from falling in love with prostitutes. You’ll discover that every one of them is trying to take revenge on all men through the particular man she’s with. They all believe that it’s some man’s fault that their lives are a mess. They’re all frustrated in love.’

  ‘She’s a blonde. Somebody once told me that blondes are all fickle and flighty by nature.’

  He roared with laughter.

  ‘Who ever told you that …?! There’s no such thing as one colour of woman who’s OK and another who isn’t. Even if the colour of their skin is different, they’re all the same colour inside. Forget about love and just enjoy the sex. Love is a terrible affliction.’

  We went to Tariq el Masihiyin and called in at the Bar El Gallo, which was frequented by both Spaniards and Moroccans. Two Spanish women were drinking and chatting with a Spaniard and a Moroccan. We downed a couple of drinks. After a while the prostitutes’ laughter began to get on our nerves, so we left. I gave Hamid 100 pesetas because next day he was planning to visit his family in Azila. I probably wouldn’t see him again unless he came to Larache.

  I went to the Bar Jacobito. Two glasses of wine. I was obsessed with the idea of returning to Shariouta’s place. Rabi’a wouldn’t be busy. I thought of her beautiful tanned, naked body and the slight downy fuzz of her back, the warmth of her strong thighs and the powerful smell of her sweat. I imagined myself dressing her in all the silk clothes she could ever want, until my bizarre imaginings had me almost choking with laughter. By this time I was writhing like a snake on a hook. I imagined her undressing and undressing until she was more naked than her nakedness. Hamid was right. Stick with the desire for the bread of thighs and not for the hornet of love. Love is a demon once it gets hold of you. It was going to cost me 150 pesetas for Rabi’a and 50 for Shariouta. This was the price of one scented night in Rabi’a’s company.

  We had a drink and then went to her room in the Hotel La Balata. We bought a bottle of Martini, three lemons and some lemon-soda. The room was small, the hotel modest, and the night scorching. We sat on the edge of the bed in our underclothes.

  ‘Why are you so keen on getting Kunza into bed?’

  ‘I’m the stubborn sort.’

  ‘You’re not in love with her, then …?’

  ‘Let’s say I fancy her.’

  ‘She’s my friend. I’ll have a word with her tomorrow, and she’ll sleep with you, and it’s not going to cost you a fortune. You see, Kunza is stubborn too. Maybe seeing you has reawakened some painful experience in her.’

  ‘It’s alright, you needn’t bother. It’s not so important now, whether I sleep with her or not.’

  We had our drinks in silence, lost in thought. Then we looked at each other.

  ‘Is she in love with anyone?’

  ‘No. She’s still waiting for true love.’

  ‘True love?’

  ‘Yes. True love.’

  ‘What do you mean, true love?’

  She looked at me, smiling.

  ‘I presume you’re joking …’
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br />   ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Everyone knows what true love is, so why don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Really I don’t.’

  ‘Don’t tell fibs.’

  We were like a couple of kids trying to unravel the secrets of the universe.

  I bought some books, by Manfaluti, Gibran Khalil Gibran and Mai Ziadeh. I shut myself away and read as much as I could. I had heard that these authors wrote about love – about true love. I went out to the Restaurant Maria near the hotel, and when I came back I had a bottle of wine and all these books about love. I found some comfort in what Manfalouti, Gibran and Ziadeh were saying, but it struck me that their kind of love was always tinged with death, or endless suffering, or obsession.

  I ran into Rabi’a in the Inner Souq. Kunza had moved to Rabi’a’s hotel so that they could live together. She asked why I didn’t join them. It would be cheaper than my present hotel and I’d be able to take anybody I wanted up to my room. A trap was being set for me – that was my first thought. But I decided to move into the hotel anyway, spurred by curiosity and a devil-may-care recklessness. I took a small room on the roof terrace, facing the sea.

  I made friends with the night porter – a young man addicted to kif and wine, who was generally stoned at any time of day or night. He had developed a hatred of women because his girlfriend Shama had run off with one of his friends. When he was too stoned to work, I stood in for him – always assuming that the kif and the wine didn’t knock me out first. Sometimes Kunza would arrive with a client and they’d end up spending the night together; other times they’d come down again after a while. Rabi’a was doing the same in another hotel. I don’t know what prevented her doing it in her own hotel, because I thought she had an arrangement with the doorman.

  I found that my reading was beginning to lessen my interest in the wine and the kif. I also bought Crazy for Laila and Cleopatra by Ahmed Shawqi. One evening Kunza found me sitting behind the desk in reception reading a stage play – The Idiot – and she told me:

  ‘You shouldn’t read so much. It’ll send you crazy!’

  A man was following her.

  Kunza was also working in a belly-dancing place as an apprentice dancer. Because of this they called her the ‘demon dancer’. One night she came back drunk. The taxi driver had to hold her up to get her into the hotel. She had a half-smoked cigarette hanging from her lips. A black lamé evening dress and a paste-jewel necklace hanging across her breasts. A red rose in her hair. People do the kinds of things at night that they’d never do in the daytime. The driver told me, as he left her:

  ‘If you don’t hold her up, she’ll keel over.’

  The whiteness of her face, neck and arms contrasted with the black of her dress. I left her swaying there while I fetched the key to her room from the board.

  ‘I’m an amazing woman! You don’t even know me yet.’

  ‘Allal, the night porter, was out for the count. Fast asleep. I removed her cigarette so it wouldn’t burn my face and propped her up. I can still remember the smell of her – a combination of wine, tobacco and strong perfume. I’d only drunk a couple of glasses that night. Drink was beyond my pocket. She wrapped her arms around my neck and we went up the stairs, with her ranting away and me filled with all kinds of sexual thoughts. I threw away her cigarette and she seemed to forget about it. We paused on the stairs so that she could talk with the Spanish consul, who frequented the dance hall and was madly in love with her. A couple of times she flopped down on the stairs and I had to heave her up.

  ‘Come on, you can’t sleep here.’

  I took off her gold shoes and laid her on the bed, fully dressed. There was a certain splendour in the way she lived her nights. I sat at her feet on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. I watched her as she lay there, her breath shallow, lost in an alcoholic haze. Now her beauty was that of a dead woman, the kind of beauty that appealed to the Babylonians and the ancient Greeks. I no longer found her in any sense attractive. The glory was gone – her brightness, her flirtatiousness and her arrogance. Now she was free of all human artifice. Now she existed entirely for herself, for whatever she wanted or didn’t want.

  I went back to my room and drank a glass of water with lemon juice. I smoked a cigarette and thought about human relationships and how sordid they usually were. I dreamed of a long row of naked men taking it in turns to go to bed with Kunza, and her saying to them:

  ‘Come to me, all of you. My time is the time of all women.’

  I fell asleep, and dreamed and dreamed, until the dream of dreams finally awoke me.

  I hadn’t seen Hamid since we parted. I was spending my days trying to sell things to the sailors off the ships, and business wasn’t good. Occasionally I’d pick up some money for taking tourists or sailors to one of the bars or brothels. Rabi’a and Kunza were sleeping with the men.

  I read diligently, and sometimes I copied down what I was reading. This way I could get a style of writing into my mind, and get the hang of writing properly even without knowing the rudiments of grammar. This had been Hassan’s suggestion. October was approaching. I wasn’t saving much money. The bars and the brothels had cleaned me out, in my efforts to forget about Kunza. I filled a big case with clothes I had traded with the sailors off the big cargo ships in exchange for traditional Moroccan handicrafts. I’d bought some of the clothes second-hand in the Souq. I decided that I’d sell them to the pupils in Larache on days when I had no money.

  The day before I was due to travel, I invited Rabi’a to come swimming. I suggested that we had lunch at one of the restaurants on the beach. We swam and played and ran about. In my mind’s eye I was spitting on Kunza, and in the meantime I was having fun with Rabi’a in the water. We flirted with each other. We played a game that involved one of us standing in the water with our legs apart, and the other person swimming through. Then we’d move further and further apart, until one of us won. I remembered overhearing a Spaniard tell his friend in the Bar General:

  Cada amor se olvida con otro amor. Recordar el primero amor es amar segunda vez.1

  But I wasn’t capable of creating a love for Rabi’a to replace my love for Kunza. Love is a curse and Kunza was my curse.

  As we sat in the Restaurant Puerta del Sol Rabi’a told me, with tears in her eyes, how her mother had died and her father had remarried less than a month later. Her father’s new wife had shown her absolutely no affection and she had hated bringing up her brother, who’d been born by Caesarean section. One night her father’s new wife went to a wedding. Rabi’a was asleep in her bed. Her father came home drunk and slept with her, apparently unaware of what he was doing. The next day he ordered her to leave Meknes or he’d kill her.

  I asked her:

  ‘Did this happen accidentally or was it on purpose? Was that all that happened?’

  She held back the tears and seemed more relaxed about it. It had done her good to talk.

  1. Every love is forgotten with a new love. To recall one’s first love is to love for a second time.

  9

  I was sitting with the mukhtar in the Café Central. He pulled a book from under his djellaba and passed it to me:

  ‘This is a wonderful book. A major work of literature.’

  It was Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, in the Arabic translation by Hafiz Ibrahim. We ordered two milky coffees and I began reading. Because the translation used bits of nineteenth-century Arabic, I had difficulty understanding some of it. There were strange expressions that I found hard to pronounce. However, the mukhtar knew the meaning of most of them.

  At the bar of the cafe a woman was sitting drinking with a group of Spaniards. She laughed a lot and three of the men were flirting with her. Every now and then she looked across at me. A bright smile, which I duly returned. I wondered what that smile might mean. Women, after all, have their devious ways. The waiter arrived with the two coffees. As he put them down, he said:

  ‘The coffees are on Miss Fatima’s account.’
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br />   So she wasn’t being devious: she was treating us. Presumably she knew the mukhtar. I smiled at her again, by way of thanks. Even before the question left my lips, he replied:

  ‘She lives the way she wants with Spaniards. She doesn’t mix with Moroccans much. She’s a good woman, though …’

  The mukhtar had this extraordinary ability to recognize people by the sounds of their voices, or even simply by touching them.

  Classes hadn’t yet begun at the Institute and the class for boarders wasn’t receiving students yet. Anyone arriving from the countryside or coming from other towns had to make their own arrangements for food and lodging. In Calle General Ahmed there was a disused grain store that belonged to the Waqf authorities. At this time I had about 1,000 pesetas on me. Hamid arrived and managed to enrol at the Mu’tamid ben ‘Abbad school. He continued to get hold of a key to the granary and we moved in.

  At night we warmed ourselves by a wood fire that we lit in one of the rooms that served as our bedroom and sitting room combined. We had candles for lighting, and we went out and bought a bottle of Negrita rum to protect ourselves from the freezing cold of the night. We sat and talked about how much we were missing Tangier. On one wall we hung a piece of board that we’d found, and we did our sums on it and tested each other on the various subjects we were studying.

  Hamid had met a young girl who’d been living in Tangier, where she’d been roughing it with the down-and-outs. She began joining us in our bachelor quarters when she found occasional generous clients who didn’t insist on spending the whole night with her.

  She cooked for us and drank with us and contributed to the food kitty. Just because she was young didn’t mean that she was cut out for loose living. She didn’t have much to say for herself but she was a pleasant, warm-hearted sort of kid. She slept on the floor between us, on a makeshift bed made of cardboard, bits of old cloth and newspaper. She seemed not to mind us taking turns to move up close to her to warm ourselves against her body. But she was obviously less interested in sex than we were. She had a kind of modesty that meant she was passive with us. She was probably like this with everyone who slept with her. Probably all she wanted from us was friendship. But we had never known the simple friendship of men with women – friendship without sex. She was a woman, and we were men, and that was that. We raped her womanliness. Sometimes she cried as she lay between us and that made me feel bad. Hamid, on the other hand, ignored her. The trouble was, we were incapable of seeing her sleep on her own. Apparently her parents had died when she was a child and she’d been brought up by an aunt.