Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  ‘It’s not right for a man to marry a prostitute.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You can’t go making children with a woman who sells herself.’

  ‘Why not? What’s so difficult about that?’

  ‘They’ll have problems later in life when they find out that their mother was a prostitute.’

  His big dream was to marry a woman who wasn’t living off immoral earnings, partly so that his kids wouldn’t grow up with problems and partly so that she wouldn’t be unfaithful to him. As far as he was concerned, if a women was a prostitute, it was a dead cert she’d end up going with someone else.

  My questions seemed to disturb him, so he changed the subject:

  ‘You’re OK – you’ve struck lucky.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve been to school. You seem to think about things a lot.’

  ‘You could study too, if you wanted. You could go to evening classes. They’re starting them all over the place.’

  ‘I don’t think so – luck’s passed me by.’

  I didn’t want to argue with him, for fear of putting him in a bad mood. As far as I was concerned, I’d end up going crazy if I didn’t study.

  We finished our drinks and went back to his place for lunch. In the evening he came with me to Sidi Talha, where we used to live. He knocked at the door of a small tin hut. Out came Arhimo. He told her:

  ‘This is your brother Mohamed.’

  She smiled shyly and there were tears in her eyes. I put my case down and we hugged each other. It was as if I smelt on her the scent of my whole family, both those who had died and those who were still living. The tears were running down her cheeks. I was crying too – but inside myself. A young boy came out. I reckoned he must be my brother Abdelaziz. His feet were bare, his clothes were worn and shabby, and he was pale and thin. Arhimo smiled through her tears as she told me:

  ‘This is your brother Abdelaziz.’

  She lifted him up for a kiss. He’d been 1 year old when I left Oran in 1951. Now he was 7. He still hadn’t learnt how to smile or laugh. His face was a picture of timidity. Tafersiti asked me to call round at his place later and then he left us. In the second of the two rooms, Arhimo picked up a little girl for me to hold:

  ‘And this is your sister Malika. She’s 2. You didn’t know about her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mother’s a bit better now. She isn’t coughing up so much blood. Father’s gone to Sebta to sell some honey.’

  ‘Honey?’

  ‘Yes. He makes it out of sugar and leftover honeycombs, and sells it to the Spaniards. He usually stays there for two or three days, so he should be back this evening.’

  When I came back in the evening, I found our neighbour Abdelhamid sitting on a chair in front of his hut. He was obviously waiting for me. He ushered me in. In one corner I saw my suitcase. It looked as if it had taken a battering.

  ‘Your father’s a damn fool. We country folk are harder on each other than we are with outsiders. He wanted to burn it. It was your sister Arhimo who stopped him – she found him breaking it up.’

  One of the two big frames in the case had its glass broken and the mount attached to it was split. The most important thing was that my exam certificate hadn’t been damaged. Our neighbour begged me to stay the night at his place, but I tucked my bag under my arm and left.

  On my way back to Tafersiti’s I went into the bar in the Saniya brothel and had two glasses of Terry cognac. I smoked one cigarette after another, aggressively, wondering how I was ever going to rid my life of my father’s presence.

  I found Zahra preparing supper. She welcomed me with open arms. I gave no indication of the turmoil inside me. Tafersiti had gone out to buy bread. I was suddenly seized with the idea of buying a knife and going back to stab my father – or working out some way of getting my brothers and sisters out of the hut and setting fire to it while he was still asleep inside.

  Tafersiti returned. He came and sat next to me, and as we talked I told him:

  ‘My mother told me that my father hit my grandfather, and kicked him, and insulted him in her presence, when they lived in the Rif. If you ask me, his side of the family are all criminals, bastards and madmen.’

  Zahra said:

  ‘Allah protect us!’

  Tafersiti said:

  ‘He’ll live to regret it.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit for his regrets.’

  He opened a bottle of wine and said:

  ‘Come on, let’s drown our sorrows.’

  He took Zahra aside for a moment and they whispered together. She put on her djellaba and went out, smiling. I asked Tafersiti about Aziza and her son Abdeslam.

  ‘She died last year. TB. It was the wine and the kif that killed her. Abdeslam copped a two-year sentence three months ago. They charged him with various robberies.’

  ‘And Sebtaoui?’

  ‘He had to get out of town fast. He went to Sebta. The pair of them had gone and robbed the Jewish shop in Souq el Trancats. They cleaned out the safe one night.’

  Zahra came back. She had a slim girl with her, whom Tafersiti welcomed warmly.

  ‘Lovely to see you, Mina. We haven’t seen you in ages.’

  I shook hands with her and she gave me a friendly smile.

  The following morning Zahra brought me up breakfast. I saw that there was 150 pesetas on the tray.

  ‘Mohamed left this for you.’

  ‘And Mina?’

  ‘She’s working for a Spanish family. She lives with them. She’s got no family here in Tetuan – she’s from Sama.’

  I left 50 pesetas for her to give to Mina. She shook her head and handed the money back to me:

  ‘You need the money more than her. Anyway, she’s a friend.’

  She was insistent, so I took the money. Maybe she wasn’t a prostitute after all. As I went out, Zahra said:

  ‘So we’ll expect you for lunch. Try to be here by about 1.’

  11

  There were four beds in the ward. In the bed next to my mother’s was a young woman who appeared to be bedridden. Her sickness gave her a certain beauty and she had a good colour in her cheeks. I placed a parcel of fruit on the little table and kissed my mother on the head; then I sat on the small white stool next to her bed.

  My mother said:

  ‘This is Miss Ghaliya, who wrote asking you to come.’

  I thanked Miss Ghaliya and we smiled at each other. She blushed, and coughed several times in embarrassment. I imagined that she must have been taught by nuns, judging by the neatness of her handwriting. I told my mother about having seen my brothers and sisters. I didn’t tell her what had happened with my father. She told me that they didn’t allow children to visit relatives at the hospital, and so the only visit she’d had was from Arhimo, because she was older than the others. Sometimes our neighbour Abdelhamid had visited her too, together with his wife. My father, on the other hand, hadn’t come to visit her once.

  Ghaliya coughed repeatedly and painfully. Her face became red and flustered and she took a spoonful of something from a small bottle. An open window was letting the cold into the room. My mother said:

  ‘They leave it open even when it’s snowing, so as to keep fresh air coming in. We keep warm by using plenty of blankets.’

  I explained that I’d passed my elementary certificate and she was obviously delighted, although there were tears in her eyes and she began coughing. Ghaliya was coughing too. I wondered whether I’d reminded her of her schooldays.

  ‘Did you see your father?’

  ‘Yes. He’s pleased I’m doing so well in my studies.’

  I knew that my sister Arhimo would eventually tell her everything that had happened between my father and me, but that would be another day.

  A woman came in and sat on the edge of her bed. My mother told her:

  ‘This is my Mohamed.’

  She smiled at the woman to make her feel welcome. Then she began coughing
again. You could see that she was in pain, from the way her smile was strained, and the way she limited her words and movements. I said:

  ‘The cold must be deadly here at night.’

  ‘They only shut the shutters. The air needs to be kept fresh.’

  I promised that I would visit her again before I went back to Larache.

  When I went to lunch with Zahra, there were just the two of us. She said:

  ‘He quite often doesn’t come home for lunch or supper. He’ll be getting drunk and playing cards. He often loses because the men who play with him know his weakness for drink. His trouble is, he doesn’t know how to pull out at the right time, when he’s on a winning streak.’

  It was an unpleasant surprise to discover that I was needing to piss all the time. My cock hurt every time I went to the toilet and any time anything pressed against it. There was pus dripping from it too. It hurt even more when I had a hard-on. The head of my cock was red and it was sore every time it rubbed against my pants. So she had been a prostitute after all …

  12

  It was evening by the time I arrived in Tangier. I took a room at the Hotel La Balata. In the periods between going for a piss, I noticed that there was pus coming from the tip of my cock. I was feeling dizzy and had a slight fever. I didn’t feel like going out to eat, so I stayed in and finished reading Cyrano de Bergerac. Smoking in confusion and pissing in pain. You dog, Cyrano! Your cock grew so long that it ended up on your face!

  By next morning, pissing was even more painful. I was worried by the way my cock was constantly dripping pus. The tip had become redder and even sorer. I described my symptoms to the emergency chemist and he put me on a three-day course of treatment. This was the first time I’d ever seen my cock drip pus, and it was also the first time I’d ever had an injection.

  I discovered that Rabi’a had been arrested in a round-up of prostitutes who’d skipped the official medical examination. That cost her one month in prison. Kunza was living in the Hotel Tahiti, in Tariq el Masihiyin. There was an American warship in Tangier harbour and its crew were all over town – in the bars and in the streets, and in the brothels too – the Spanish brothel, the French one and the Jewish one. I ran into three of there sailors (one of whom was a Filippino) in the Inner Souq and offered to take them to the brothel of the beautiful Madame Simone. Anybody who had enough English to say: ‘Hello … Come on … This way …’ could have led a whole battalion of them.

  There were several girls in the reception area when we arrived – French, Spanish and one Italian. When they sat on a chair, their skirts showed their bare, slender thighs, and the way they stood in their high heels showed their arses to perfection. The honey of human beauty, waiting for someone to taste it. We ordered beers at the small bar in the hallway. One of the girls walked across to us and two others followed. Madame Simone took me aside and said:

  ‘I’ll give you 30 out of every 100 pesetas they spend, the usual rate with tourists. Finish your beer and come back after they’ve gone, or come back tomorrow.’

  The sailors gave me 2 dollars apiece as a tip. I had no way of checking how much they were going to spend, but usually brothel madames pay a reasonable percentage, even to non-officials, just to keep sweet with everyone.

  Shortly before midnight I left a bar in the port. I saw the drunken Filippino being frogmarched, barefoot, by two US naval police. His white sailor’s uniform didn’t look so good now. Presumably the police had emptied his pockets and given him a good beating. He’d seemed more level-headed than his friends when I’d taken them to Madame Simone’s.

  The bitch gave me 100 pesetas. She told me:

  ‘They didn’t spend much.’

  The price of a session with one of the girls would have been 100 pesetas. My cock had stopped dripping. Not one of them would have me, though. I preferred it at Marie Karkan’s. At least there I’d be guaranteed a session. I’d seen plenty of people like myself going in and out. And it would only cost me 50 pesetas. Her girls were Spanish, and they were less snobby about going with Moroccans than Madame Simone’s girls.

  One of the girls was Christo Valina. I knew her from when I’d sold her smuggled cigarettes the year before. As I stood at the small bar, Marie Karkan was talking with a client. I ordered a glass of sherry. Christo Valina was sitting at the bar, smoking and thumbing through a fashion mag. I offered to buy her a drink. She was happy to accept, in a voice that was definitely sexy. She was drinking Cinzano. We clinked glasses. I lit her cigarette for her and she said:

  ‘I haven’t seen you round the Inner Souq for a while. Don’t you sell cigarettes any more?’

  ‘These days I’m studying in Larache.’

  ‘Well, you’re better off doing that …’

  We ordered two more drinks and went to her room. She put a dark violet-coloured pastille into a bowl, and dissolved it in warm water so as to wash herself. She gave me a bar of scented soap for me to do the same. She poured eau de cologne onto pieces of cotton wool. She gave me one of them and we wiped the fronts of our bodies. Sitting naked on the edge of the bed, we drank from our glasses, and kissed, and made love, and talked a little about the way Tangier was going fast downhill. She was born in Tangier, and had subsequently discovered that her mother had also been a prostitute. Her sister had been similarly engaged for a while before getting married to a young Moroccan who was a smuggler. We made love again and the scent of her armpits mingled with the scent of her perfume. Her breasts were plump and I could see the image of my face reflected in her eyes.

  13

  Before I could even knock on the door of the granary, a young girl from the house over the road called across. She was playing hopscotch with her friend, on white chalk squares on the ground. She said:

  ‘If you’re looking for your friend, they came and threw him out.’

  Then she carried on with her game. She spoke to her friend in Spanish and the friend replied in Spanish too:

  ‘Shall I jump now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall I jump now?’

  When they’d finished one round, I asked:

  ‘What do you mean, they threw him out?’

  ‘Two policemen came and took him away. They took the black lady and her friend too.’

  I booked into a room at the Hotel Maliqa and went out for a stroll. It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I went to see the mukhtar at his house. He was looking depressed. His mother welcomed me in and offered me tea and black bread with honey and butter. A moment or two later the mukhtar said he wanted to go out. Something had obviously happened to upset him. He looked sad in a way that I’d not seen before. When we got to the Café Central, he explained:

  ‘A teacher asked my girl to marry him.’

  ‘Women prefer marriage to love.’

  ‘What’s the point of marriage without love?’

  ‘That’s the way of women.’

  ‘So a curse on love, then!’

  ‘And a curse on marriage too, because it starts with a yes and ends with a no.’

  Salwa’s childminder told me that Fatima had gone off to Spain, looking for work. Salwa’s grandfather had come and taken her with him to spend her holidays in the country. I presumed that Fatima would be working in a bar or a dance hall somewhere. Hamid had been held at the police station for a couple of days, and when they’d let him out he’d travelled to Asila. Saida and Aisha had disappeared to some other part of the country. I felt horribly lonely. The small world that I had created outside the Institute had been torn apart. The apple was rotten, the orange was split in two, mulberry juice was dripping from two lips, and sweet distance was beginning to create a nostalgic longing.

  14

  When I passed the entrance exam to go to teacher training college, it felt like I was being born again. I really imagined that I was building an impregnable wall that would shield me from society’s contempt, from ignorance and from life’s miseries. That was stupid of me. As it turned out, my happiness was outweighed by bad lu
ck.

  My father’s only interest in my exam pass was the fact that he’d be getting money out of my monthly grant. He’d started complaining about having to provide food for me and about letting me stay in his rat-infested shack – at least until I collected my first grant cheque. He was the kind of man who worshipped money more than he worshipped God, but he wouldn’t lift a finger to earn it – he expected others to earn it for him.

  All my dormant hatred for him was rekindled. Relations between us had settled into a mutual loathing. I didn’t understand why he hated me so much. He never missed a chance of saying bad things about me, whether to my face or behind my back. It had always struck me that he had the face of a criminal – the face of someone who’s recently come out of prison after a period of hard labour. How much longer would I let him prey on my mind?

  The year was 1960 and it was the summer holidays. The passage of time had put a big gap between me and my old friends in Tetuan. Some of them had long since left the town. I wondered if we’d recognize each other if we ever met again. The only one of our old gang still in town was Tafersiti. He was doing very nicely. He’d more or less cornered the market in fridges and refrigerated vehicles, and had another three businesses going on the side.

  We ran into each other fairly often and found that we still had a lot in common. After all, we’d all been suckled at the breast of suffering. He led a strange kind of existence – half the day indulging his sex life, and the other half doing business with the town’s traders. Whenever we met, we’d drink a couple of toasts to Independence. Once he took me along to the Via Rosa brothel in Calle Martil. I’d never seen wastefulness on a scale like this. He was pouring bottles of champagne over the feet of the Spanish prostitutes. There were cheers and shrieks of delight: ‘Long life to your mother, Mohamed!’

  On that occasion I drank the night away, at his expense, until dawn the following morning. I hadn’t noticed him leaving. I returned to town on foot. It had been a night to remember and I was still drunk. As I searched for a cigarette in my pocket, I found some crumpled banknotes. It was a few hundred pesetas. Tafersiti must have slipped them into my pocket when I wasn’t looking. Or maybe he’d given them to me and I’d forgotten – a black hole.