Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  He explained the poem and told me about the life of the poet, the times he lived in and his philosophy of life. Sometimes when I saw him in or around the Institute, he’d be muttering to himself, and I reckoned he was probably reciting classical poetry or verses from the Koran.

  I didn’t forget Mr Abdullah’s cafe. Hamid tended not to go there. He preferred sitting with Salahami in his restaurant, eating whatever there was to eat and smoking kif with him. Or he’d visit Muwanfarir in his barber’s shop, drinking wine with him in the evening, or during the day if it was a school holiday. Usually the only clients that Muwanfarir got were newcomers to the town, and they rarely came back a second time because the man was an alcoholic. His hands shook as he shaved his clients. In fact the only local people who ever came back to him were drunks like himself.

  Most of the pupils travelled away on days when there was no school. On one particular Sunday morning, which was cold and cloudy, I’d had a cup of tea and then gone to give Salwa her lesson. Seven or eight customers were in the café playing cards. As I came in, Mr Abdullah turned to a stout man and pointed me out to him:

  ‘There’s one of them …’

  He sat me next to the man at their table. His name was apparently Bandir and he was missing most of his teeth. Mr Abdullah continued talking to him as he walked across to stand by the stove:

  ‘This young man’s a student, so he should be able to solve your problem.’

  Bandir asked me, in a not particularly friendly way:

  ‘Are you really a student?’

  ‘Yes. Why – do you have a problem?’

  ‘Mr Abdullah can explain better than me.’

  Mr Abdullah prepared a tea for me and then sat down:

  ‘This gentleman is a beggar. He wants to get married and his bride-to-be is a beggar like himself. The trouble is, the registrar says that before he can marry them, he needs something that this gentleman does not have. In other words, money. He’s a travelling storyteller. She sells incense. Why don’t you write them a marriage contract, and we can be witnesses, and Allah will bless this union. The marriage of a beggar to a beggar!’

  I knew of no law that said that I couldn’t do what I was about to do. And anyway, poverty is above the law. I said:

  ‘And why not, in the name of Allah?’

  The storyteller went out and then returned, bringing a woman who was veiled and wearing a gown. She had a squint in her left eye and was carrying a large basket full of merchandise. Mr Abdullah brought us into a room. We sat on a mat, since that was all the furniture there was. He laid out two sheets of white paper for me, and then went out and left me to draw up the contract. This I did. In addition, I duly recorded the extent of their worldly goods. I gave one copy to the man and handed the other to Mr Abdullah. He brought us a second round of tea and invoked a blessing on the proceedings. We both raised our hands. I began reciting a prayer and Mr Abdullah ended it off with an Amen. Then I murmured in a low voice an Arabic poem by Mahyar ed Dulaimi that I had once learnt:

  ‘Among all the people of her tribe, Umm Said had eyes only for me, and she came asking after me.’

  The man handed me a few crumpled banknotes. I declined them, saying:

  ‘Never. I did it as a favour.’

  He was insistent:

  ‘Take it. It’s just a small token … for luck.’

  Mr Abdullah added:

  ‘Please, accept this blessing from him.’

  When the couple had left, Mr Abdullah told me:

  ‘That was the best good turn you’ll ever do. There’s a great future in store for you, God willing.’

  ‘Amen.’

  I went to visit Fatima. I was surprised to find her looking sad. She smiled as she let me in, but her eyes were moist and her hand was cold and limp. Before I could ask what was making her sad, she told me:

  ‘Salwa must be sick. She won’t eat anything. She’s got a temperature.’

  ‘Children’s illnesses pass quickly. She’ll be alright.’

  Salwa was asleep in her mother’s bed. On the small table next to her stood a half-drunk glass of orange juice.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll take her to a doctor I know,’ I said.

  The look on her face was as if she’d never known a day’s happiness in her life. As if the grief was piling up inside her. At that time on a Sunday I usually found her dressed up in her best, but on that particular day it was obvious there’d be no perfume, no dressing-up and no going out. Salwa’s sickness took priority over everything.

  She asked what I wanted to drink.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’

  I declined the offer gently. I promised I’d come back in the evening. Out in the street, I felt as if all her sadness had somehow transferred onto me. I found myself walking in the municipal park. The sky was overcast. There was no one about. I remembered Salwa playing among the Spanish children there, and I recalled their mothers sitting and knitting and chatting and warning their children when their games got too boisterous. I thought back to Salwa’s mother drinking at the bar of the Café Central. Big drops of rain began to fall and a sudden breeze blew up. I left the park at a run and headed back towards the granary. When I got there, I was surprised to find the place stacked with dozens of sacks of cement.

  ‘What’s all this for?’

  ‘It’s for building the mosque which Mohamed el Khamis is going to dedicate in town. The contractor’s agreed to pay me 25 pesetas a day if I let him use the granary to store it till the mosque is finished. Manna from heaven! Sometimes the Lord throws the likes of us into stormy seas but he doesn’t let us drown.’

  ‘Where’s Saida?’

  ‘Gone to the market.’

  He was flicking through a book about the history of the Phoenicians in North Africa. He said:

  ‘Did you know that it was the Phoenicians who first taught the North Africans how to read and write?’

  ‘Before them, people used to worship stones – the Druids and so on. But the roots of the Berber language are Semitic, or so I’ve heard.’

  I sat down. On the box-cum-table stood a half-bottle of wine. Hamid poured two glasses.

  ‘The headmaster at the Institute has said that I’ll be allowed to attend lessons, but not to take exams. If I’m not up to it, I’ll have to go back to Tangier, to be a pimp or a thief or a criminal again. Anything could happen if I don’t make it with my studies. Mind you, you’re no better off than me … You’d have to go back to working in one of the cafés, or in the port …’

  He was right. I didn’t have magic fingers like his, for stealing from other people’s pockets.

  We downed the last of our drinks.

  ‘Fatima’s upset because her daughter’s sick.’

  ‘Prostitutes tend to worry about their children more than married women do.’

  Saida came in carrying a large bag of shopping. She had a young woman with her whom she introduced:

  ‘This is Aisha.’

  Hamid sat her cheerfully on the box. He was generally polite to women in their presence, even though he said terrible things about them behind their backs. Saida lit a cigarette and busied herself at the stove in the corner, preparing lunch. Hamid and I were sizing up the new arrival.

  She accepted a cigarette from me. Hamid lit it and then he asked:

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Qasr el Kebir.’

  ‘So we’re neighbours. I’m from Azila.’

  I gave him 10 pesetas to buy a bottle of wine and he asked me:

  ‘Why don’t you stay and have lunch with us?’

  ‘I can’t. They mark absences in the class register. If I’m absent too often, they’ll take away my grant. I’ll be back after lunch.’

  I found mukhtar Haddad walking on his own under the arches of Souq el Kubaybat. I stood in his path, blocking his way. This time he greeted me by name without even needing to touch me. It was as if he could recognize me even from my smell. Under one arm he had a copy of André Gide’s La Symphonie Pastora
le, in Hassan Sadiq’s 1978 translation. He told me:

  ‘This is a novel by a French author. They tell me it’s one of the best things he ever wrote. If you like, we could read it together this evening.’

  I agreed readily. Then he asked me to go with him to the street where his beloved Virgin lived. I saw three girls coming down the street towards us. They were looking over at us and laughing. The mukhtar’s body was electric with excitement. He gripped my arm tightly:

  ‘There she is – that’s her, coming with her friends.’

  ‘There are three of them.’

  ‘The most beautiful one is the short one …? The one with rosy cheeks … Am I right?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Pretend you haven’t noticed them. Just carry on as if nothing’s happened. Don’t even look at them.’

  When they’d gone, whispering among themselves, he told me:

  ‘I’m supposed to start giving one of them Arabic lessons tomorrow.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The brown-haired one.’

  He left me near the Institute and carried on picking his way down the streets that he knew so well. At about 4 o’clock I went back to Fatima’s. All the worry made her look thinner than usual. Salwa was sitting up in bed. Her cheeks looked flushed. Her mother sat next to her, smiling at her. I patted the child’s cheek and stroked her hair. The way that Salwa looked at me was as if she was seeing me for the first time. She’d probably missed me. She looked somehow worried too. Fatima poured two glasses of Martini and handed one to me. On the radio Abd el Wahab was singing: ‘From her eyes came the call of love.’ I don’t think I ever saw Fatima angry, but she was the kind of person who could be bright and happy one minute, and then get horribly depressed the next, over the slightest thing.

  I found Hamid on his own. An old RCA radio, with the sound of flamenco coming from it. A light bulb hanging on the wall bathed the room in brightness. The radio had been a present from Muwanfarir the barber, since he hadn’t used it for years. Hamid had invented a system of stealing electricity from the street outside. The problem was that he could only use it at night. He showed me how to disconnect the wire and pull it back into the granary first thing in the morning or before going to bed at night.

  ‘What about a ladder to disconnect the wire?’

  He pointed to some boxes:

  ‘Those are my ladder.’

  ‘Where are Aisha and Saida?’

  ‘They’re out on the job. They’ll be back this evening with some food. Why didn’t you come back after lunch?’

  ‘I had a nap, then I went over to Fatima’s. Her daughter seems to be getting better now.’

  I sat down:

  ‘I’ll have to get back to the Institute tonight. Like I told you, they keep a register of absences.’

  ‘Screw the register! Aisha’s going to spend the night with us. She’s all yours.’

  Aisha and Saida returned, bringing some food and two bottles of wine. So to hell with class registers! There were plenty of ways of earning a living in Tangier. I was beginning to get the hang of reading and writing and I no longer needed other people to read books and letters for me. I thought back to what life had been like with Fawziya, and the easy friendship of Hamid, in the Hotel El Qasabah, and the thought of all this left me with a mixed sense of both happiness and sadness. Saida and Aisha came back with the shopping and put it down. Hamid picked up a book and opened it.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘A chapter on the history of the Assyrians and Babylonians.’

  ‘What’s the point of filling your head with stuff like that? It’s no use for anything.’

  ‘I don’t agree. Everything that happens now is grafted onto what came before. History matters, whether we like it or not.’

  Hamid poured wine into the only two glasses we had. He and Saida drank from one glass, and Aisha and I from the other. Then there was a knock at the door. Hamid got up from the bed and made his way barefoot across the floor. He opened the door to find an elderly man standing there, shabbily dressed. Hamid helped him to load four of the sacks of cement onto a little handcart. I thought:

  ‘Not a bad way of earning some money fast – but we’ll be in big trouble when the contractor finds out …’

  Hamid switched on the radio. There was the voice of Asmahan, singing ‘Enjoy your youth in Vienna’.

  I said:

  ‘If they find out we’ve been stealing electricity, they’ll throw us out on our necks.’

  ‘No problem. We just look for another place. After all, this is hardly a palace, is it? So we’ve nothing to lose.’

  Hamid’s always ready to start a new life – start all over again. He never sticks to anything. The way he sees it, everything in life is fragile anyway and liable to fall apart from one minute to the next.

  I finished reading La Symphonie Pastorale with the mukhtar in two sittings. As we sat in the Café Central, he sighed and said:

  ‘I don’t know why fate is always so cruel to good people and brings good things to bad people. What did poor Gertrude do to deserve what happened to her in the book?’

  ‘I think that the “shepherd” was wrong to fall in love with her. He was the one who ruined her. If he’d left her to his son Jacques, she wouldn’t have succumbed to despair and committed suicide.’

  ‘This is one of the things about men of religion. Sometimes they defile people who are pure. But then again, Gertrude died as a woman and didn’t end her life as an animal.’

  Hamid joined us at the Institute, but he didn’t take the lessons very seriously. He’d made friends with one particular student, who was encouraging him to skip classes. He had one foot in the Institute and one foot in Tangier, so that if he failed with reading and writing, he could just go back to picking people’s pockets. As for the sacks of cement that he was systematically stealing every night, he blew the money on drink and hanging out. He didn’t split the proceeds fifty-fifty with me – he just gave me what he felt like. He was the boss of the granary, so he could do what he liked. He could even bring other girls back to the granary and sleep with them right under Saida’s nose. He bought himself new clothes, a Parker pen, and a leather wallet which he was always flashing in front of the teachers. He spent his days hanging round the bars. He bought some smart clothes for Aisha and Saida, trying to outdo their better-paying clients. Spanish perfume too. They were beginning to look like top-class call girls.

  We were in the middle of exams when a letter arrived for me, written in Spanish. It came from the TB hospital in Tetuan. The handwriting was elegant. It looked like the kind of writing they taught in convents. ‘The writer of this letter sends greetings and urges you to visit your mother as soon as you can.’

  On the final day of the exams I went to see Fatima. I told her that I needed to make a trip. She insisted on giving me 100 pesetas, which she tucked into my jacket pocket.

  ‘Don’t worry – everything’ll turn out fine. Today you can travel like a teacher or a lawyer and forget that you’re poor.’

  Salwa was not there at the time.

  Hamid invited me for supper and suggested that I spend that night at the granary. I found Saida and Aisha in their prettiest clothes. The smell of their perfume was overpowering … Hamid had bought some secondhand furniture and decorated the walls with pin-ups that he’d cut out of magazines. He’d made a little bookshelf from a plank of wood and some bricks. I asked him:

  ‘How are things working out with your Spanish contractor?’

  ‘A wonderful man. The best thing about him is that he doesn’t keep a close eye on things. As they say, he’s the bread of Allah! He still seems to like me, so I don’t think he suspects anything.’

  ‘You’ve been overdoing it a bit, though, with the fancy clothes and the furniture for the granary …’

  ‘Don’t you think he’s stealing too? From the funds for building the mosque …’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘So stop worrying, then
.’

  Saida and Aisha looked even prettier than usual and Hamid seemed unusually friendly. Probably it just felt that way because I was about to leave them for ten days.

  10

  I met a vegetable seller I’d known in Trancats and he told me that Tafersiti was now living in Bourj el Af ‘a. I hadn’t seen him for the best part of six years. I found him in the Café Saniya playing cards and he took me back to his place.

  As we went down the street, several houses had prostitutes standing in the doorways. Some of them were peering out at the passers-by, while others kept out of sight. They looked very sexy and inviting. There were men hanging around outside, both young and old, watching the girls. Occasionally one would go up and inquire how much it would cost, and then he’d either go in or move on to one of the others.

  We went into the Bar Rebertito and ordered a couple of sherries. The bar still had some of its former splendour – down to the stuffed bulls’ heads hanging on the walls. This was the first time I’d ever actually been into the place. I only knew it from when I was a kid. In those days I used to grab the left-over drinks off the tables outside. I’d drink whatever was in the glasses, whether lemonade or wine, and then I’d go round picking up dog-ends off the floor. The bar was now used by white-collar workers, Moroccan small businessmen and the remnants of the Spanish military presence in the city. Tafersiti worked during the summer selling fridges with a Spaniard. For the rest of the year he dealt in wholesale fruit and vegetables, like we used to in the old days. I asked him about his one-time girlfriend, Latifa.

  ‘Oh, she got married. She’s got three kids now. I had a lot of girlfriends after her, but they all ended up wanting to get married.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever think of marrying one of them?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Why not?’