I used to sit in one of the cafés on the Feddane, smoking kif with the customers there. The kif was free. I joined in with the card players too, but I didn’t gamble. My mother was still slipping me the price of a pack of cigarettes and a glass of tea. Sometimes I ended up not even spending the money because some customer was enjoying my company and offered to treat me. I used to go and read books in the English bookshop, too, and often I’d stay until it closed. Once I offered my services as a tourist guide to a group of middle-aged English couples. They seemed to enjoy my company. I knew enough words of English to show them around and the map of the old city was still imprinted in my memory. They took a photo of me, together with their group, and gave me 100 pesetas, which was enough to last me for a good few days.
My father lost no opportunity to run me down in front of the neighbours and his friends (most of his friends were wounded exsoldiers from Franco’s war, who used to hang out in Plaza Feddane).
‘He’s just an ignorant bastard like me. Don’t tell me he’s actually learnt anything! If you ask me, they must have made a mistake in the paperwork when they passed him.’
His resentment against me was endless. If my mother ever protested, he’d beat her and curse her, just as he used to do with us. And the hatred seemed to pursue me even after his death.
His friends went along with whatever he said about me because some of them had sons who earned their living from prostitution – and why shouldn’t I be one of them too, so we could all be in the shit together? But there were exceptions. An elderly man stopped me in the street one day:
‘Are you the son of Hadu ‘Allal el Choukri?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it true you’re studying to be a teacher?’
‘Yes.’
‘May Allah be with you! Some people would love to have a son like you, but your father treats you like dirt and goes round speaking badly of you. Your father’s the one who’s stupid!’
‘I know. He was born to hate the whole world. He even hates himself!’
‘Allah protect us!’
While I was in Tetuan, a wave of nostalgia came over me – memories of the playgrounds of my childhood, the maze of alleyways, the streets, the outskirts of town. We were young and we got up to all kinds of mischief. I remembered stealing from the orchards up the side of the valley. Sometimes we stripped naked and had masturbation competitions: ‘I came first …’ I visited Aïn Khabbès and the place where we used to live in Gharsat Baninas. I remembered how we used to fight with sticks and stones. In spring, we celebrated the dew and the sun and the swallows. We danced and we shouted. As I walked about, I heard an invisible cockerel crowing from some place nearby. I remembered a rainbow, and how we rode donkeys, and hung onto the backs of lorries as they drove off. The fig tree was still there, tall and green. There were creepers climbing up it, twining round the branches and hiding some of its beauty. Things are always more beautiful when you look back on them. That childhood magic stays with us all our lives.
I’m writing some of the chapters of this book in 1990. During the summer of last year, I had a visit from a Japanese friend, Nutahara, who was in Tangier together with his wife Suku. He was translating For Bread Alone into Japanese. Having completed three pages, he had stopped:
‘I decided that if I wanted to do a really good translation, I ought to go and take a look at the places where the things in the book happened …’
We set off from Tetuan on the way back to Tangier. The water cistern was the first thing we came to. He took lots of photos of it, from various angles. When he finished, he smiled and said:
‘In your book you described this cistern and everything around it as if it was very beautiful. But it’s not. What’s more, there’s nothing to suggest that it was beautiful even in those days.’
I told him:
‘That’s the purpose of art – to make life beautiful even when it’s ugly. In my mind’s eye I still see this water tank as beautiful, and that’s the way I’m always going to remember it. Even if it was really only a muddy puddle. What’s more, when I wrote the description, I was a long way away from it, in time and space.’
I now returned to the water cistern again. The midday heat was scorching. I stood on top of the tank gazing at the house where we had lived in the early 1940s. A house of daily conflicts between my parents. A house that was poor, but had its moments of beauty. Today it was radiant with white paint and a new door. When we lived there, the paint was dull and peeling and the place was falling apart. I remembered trying to patch it up several times with planks that were even older than the house itself.
A woman came out of the house. She was getting on a bit. Her broad bosom was sagging but she had a clear, open country face. A young woman appeared behind her, surrounded by barefoot kids.
‘My family used to live here.’
‘What was your mother’s name?’
‘Maimouna.’
‘We moved in when you left. I know your mother. I haven’t seen her for ages. Where do your folks live today?’
‘In Sidi Talha. Barrio San Antonio.’
‘How is your poor mother?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘I’ll visit her one day, if Allah wills. Give her my best regards.’
‘I shall.’
I had no loose change to give the kids and nothing to offer the woman either. I made my excuses and left. I walked down Tariq el Nakhil, looking back on my memories with a mixture of happiness and sadness. The Instituto Baylar still stood there, large and looming.
I read for a while, but after that I couldn’t think of anything to do. If I’d been in Tangier I wouldn’t have felt so totally bored. In Tangier even if you find yourself completely penniless and depressed, something interesting or enjoyable always seems to come along. Solitude there is free and wild, and tastes of wild berries; here it was constrained and tasted like shit. I took a stroll to the La Pergola cabaret, which was advertising tango-dancing (Carlos Gardel and Concha Bakir), flamenco, Las Cublas (folk singers) and gypsy dancing. There was the house where the young Italian woman used to live, with the bin in front of her door from which I used to scavenge fag ends stained with the red of her lipstick. I remembered how smoking them used to bring a kind of sexual pleasure. I went for a walk in the park. I didn’t even have the price of a cup of tea in the Café Maghara. Hadi Jouini was singing ‘Under the jasmine tree in the night’. My mother’s business was usually sluggish in the middle of the month, so it wasn’t always possible for her to give me money. A scented breeze was blowing.
I found that it soothed my spirit to be in the middle of all this greenery, where young lovers come so that they can be alone. There were only a few small goldfish left in the pond. Somebody told me that the drunks who slept in the park had caught all the rest and grilled and eaten them. The ducks in the park had disappeared completely. There was a monkey in a cage, with children teasing it, and a smiling photographer offering to take pictures of the courting couples. I looked at these Moroccan lovers, fascinated with the idea of freedom. It was the period when they were plucking up courage and beginning to come out from their hiding places, out into the streets, under trees, in cinemas, in European clothing and wearing ties. A strange picture of men and women in mismatched colours, with the women stumbling along in high-heel shoes. Innocent vanity and harmless coquettry. The age of the lover hadn’t yet come.
I walked round Trancats, and the Upper Souq, and Gharsat Baninas, and the ghetto (the Jewish quarter) at least once a day. The sight of the traffic, the sounds of people working, and the hubbub of the traders and shopkeepers in these streets, made the day a little less boring. But on the other hand I had an alarming thought that one day I might end up stuck right back there in Tetuan, working in those same streets. I’d had enough of all that shit and humiliation when I was a kid.
I was sleeping in one room together with my brothers and sisters, and my parents slept in the other. My father and I weren’t talking. So as to avoid s
eeing him, I used to get back at about midnight. As soon as he heard me coming in, he’d start his muttering and cursing. Mostly it was directed at me. My mother would certainly have been asleep. Since she never answered him, I assumed that he was talking to her as if she was awake, as if she could hear him. Then, eventually, when he got tired of cursing her for the pigs that she had borne him, he fell asleep and began to snore. He and I were both as stubborn as each other. He disapproved of me as a son, and I disapproved of him as a father. Our rows were getting steadily worse as the days went by. One thing was certain – he was interested in nobody but himself. He had no time for people, animals or things unless there was something in it for him.
By the beginning of September I was just wishing that this lousy summer would be over as soon as possible, so that I could sink back into autumn, and then winter, and the cosy warmth of memories …
I didn’t often come back to the hut of disaster and ill omen during the day, but on this particular day I did. I was tired and hungry. My brother Abdelaziz was selling sesame cake and sweets to the kids in the street from on top of a box, which he pretended was a grocer’s shop. The boy was a born businessman. He was busy counting out his takings in front of us, and he checked them through several times. He was proud of what he’d earned and he challenged his sisters to earn anything like it. If he’d dared, he would have challenged our layabout father too.
I found Habiba listening attentively as my mother and my sister Arhimo talked with her. My other sister, Malika, was fast asleep on my mother’s shoulder, with her head close to mother’s head. My mother’s closeness with Habiba was a continuation of her friendship with Habiba’s mother. Habiba’s mother had also had a hard time with a cruel, dissolute husband, but she’d fought with him until she was eventually defeated by death. The father had forced Habiba, his only daughter, to marry a middle-aged friend of his, a cattle dealer, when she was barely 17. The man divorced her just over a year later because she hadn’t borne him a child. Her father and her aunt were horrible to her, and she had nobody she could turn to for protection.
They stuck her in a mental hospital, because she started breaking things around the house and she’d taken to tearing her clothes. In the hospital she used to go into wild dancing fits, until in the end she’d either pass out or the doctors would give her an injection. After a few months, she was discharged, to return to normal life.
In the summer holidays she met a young man on the beach at Martil. He was on holiday with his family. He married her in Tetuan and she went to live with him in Rabat. He was working as an odd-job man and she had four children with him. But he was cruel to her, beating her viciously, until, in the end, she walked out on him, leaving him with the four children. He divorced her and she went to Sebta, taking her madness with her. In Sebta she started her dancing fits again and she used to hang around the working-class areas, getting drunk, flirting with the men and making fun of the women. She had no place to live, so she used to sleep with any of the tramps who’d give her shelter for the night in the Principe. Sometimes she’d make a wreath of flowers and put it on her head, and then she’d walk along dragging four clattering metal plates behind her, each tied on a separate piece of string. These metal plates symbolized the four children that she’d left in Rabat with her ‘barbaric’ husband, as she called him. When she was in one of her lucid phases, she got on well with people and they used to give her food and clothes. But her disorderly behaviour finally got so out of hand that the authorities moved her to Tetuan and put her into the Hospital for Nervous Disorders, in an attempt to cure her of her hysterical fits.
Once again she left hospital to begin a normal life, in an attempt to leave all that behind her. She started taking care of herself and bought smarter clothes, in which she’d parade, like a child, through the streets of the city. Her father owned shops and flats. She lived in one of them, on the ground floor, and above her lived her widowed, childless aunt. The father decided to give them both a monthly allowance to live on, but it was a pittance. Eventually Habiba married for a third time, after having spent years wandering the streets. And in the seventh month of this marriage she died of cholera while she and her husband were expecting their first child.
I found that I enjoyed being in Habiba’s presence as she discussed her worries about her husband and her children in Rabat with my mother. After a while, Arhimo went out, together with Fatima, her best friend from across the street, and my mother began busying herself at the stove in the yard of the hut. Malika was still fast asleep. Habiba asked if I’d like to go to her house for supper. The thought of this cheered me up a bit. She lived in the Maliqa quarter of town. Before she went, she slipped a crumpled 1,000-franc note into my hand.
‘Buy something to drink. I need to go out for a while. Wait for me in front of the cinema.’
My mother was busy with the cooking. She never questioned me about my comings and goings. Either I slept in the hut or I didn’t. This was a long-established understanding between us. She watched me going out as she was in the process of putting something in a saucepan.
‘I’m going out.’
She nodded and didn’t say a word. She wasn’t the sort to give me meaningful looks. Her dark eyes had an eternal sadness in them. She always showed me more affection than she did to my brothers and sisters. Maybe this was because I was the eldest and had been saved from starvation by a miracle; maybe it was because I’d been born in the Rif and spoke with her in the language of her family; and maybe it was also because I was living away from home. My brothers and sisters, who were born in Tetuan, didn’t speak dialect and they didn’t understand much either. They weren’t at all interested in learning it. My mother used to speak to them in Rif dialect, but they always replied in Arabic. As far as possible they always tried to hide their origins. They thought that people from the Rif were backward. I knew a lot of people who thought like that, young and old alike.
I stopped off in the Barrio Maliqa to have a couple of glasses of wine in a Spanish wine shop, and I bought a bottle. Habiba had described her flat to me. It was simple and neat and reminded me of Fatima’s house in Larache. A bedsit, belonging to a single woman who took pride in keeping her place clean and polishing the furniture. The room was lovingly decorated. On the wall hung a picture of herself as a girl with her father in Bab et Toute, as well as a photo of herself in traditional wedding dress and a large framed portrait of her mother. There were a couple of dolls on top of a low wardrobe, a ticking wall clock as well as a cuckoo clock, a bedside table with a small lamp, a marble-topped table with a mirror on it and various bits of make-up, and a vase containing a single red rose and some white flowers.
We ate our fish supper, drank the wine and afterwards smoked a cigarette. Then we began talking about life’s problems. When we got tired of that, we agreed that the only way that people find out the truth about themselves and about others is through misfortunes and disasters. Habiba had let down her hair. It had been in plaits when she was at our hut. She seemed more beautiful now. Her movements were measured and graceful, her voice was gentle, her conversation was unhurried and happy, and she had a tranquil, almost sleepy look.
As I talked to her about my studies in Larache and my life in Tangier, her mind occasionally seemed to wander. I was happy that she’d invited me to sleep at her place. It meant I didn’t have to listen to my father spewing out his garbage all night in the hut of ill omen. She begged me to sleep in her bed and she would sleep on the couch, but I insisted on sleeping on the couch. I went to bed fully clothed. Darkness settled. She put the light out and there was silence. The evening wasn’t the best I’d ever enjoyed, but it had been good.
Habiba turned over in bed several times. She couldn’t get to sleep. Lust was beginning to get the better of me. For more than two months I hadn’t touched a woman’s thigh or breast. I was missing the pleasures of sex, although masturbation had its own pleasures (and its advantages too, because it doesn’t tie you down, and it’s free of the
inconveniences of long-lasting relationships and venereal diseases). Had her invitation to me been just an act of friendship? Was it because she wanted company or had it been desire? It was desire – of that I was certain, judging from the way she’d looked at me. But I didn’t know what her dormant madness might have in store for me. I didn’t want to be the one responsible for setting her off on more crazy dancing.
A part of me was getting excited and pushing me towards her. In my Tangier days I’d more than once found myself waking up in a hotel, or in a friend’s house, and not knowing the woman who was sleeping with me. Or sometimes I’d find that she’d left while I was still asleep, without my seeing her go, and leaving me with nothing but the memory of my cock inside her. It was usually drunkenness or a chance encounter of the night that brought us together, but Habiba wasn’t a chance encounter, and we weren’t drunk either.
I suspected that I would be taking advantage of her kindness if it turned out that she didn’t want me. Why couldn’t I just relax and enjoy the night – enjoy the sublime silence and the closeness? Why does desire have to spoil everything that’s beautiful? I got up, walking quietly like a thief, and slipped into bed with her, still fully clothed. She was sleeping curled up in the foetal position. Her hair was hanging over her face. All of a sudden, she stretched out, as if relaxing, and then returned to her previous position. She whispered, as if in a dream, or as if she was extremely tired:
‘Leave me alone. I’m asleep.’
‘I love you.’
‘Spare me the jokes for tonight …’
It was stupid of me, she was right. But I carried on with my play-acting. I tried kissing her and touching her, because in a way I wanted to be sure of her rejection. She just lay there, inert, making it obvious she wasn’t interested. She knew what she didn’t want. I’d obviously misread the situation. Suddenly I felt her body shudder and stiffen, and something warm and wet on my trousers. She’d pissed herself. Had she pissed in her sleep or was she awake? Did she have a pissing madness as well as a dancing madness? In a brothel in Tangier once I’d slept with Pissing Laila, but she hadn’t pissed like Habiba had pissed.
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