Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  I backed off before I stirred up some other madness in her. I took my trousers off and lay face down on the couch. She was crying. Was she purging herself of my insult or was she trying some kind of come-on? Either way, I wasn’t in the mood for playing games. Some women don’t soften towards a man unless they cry, but I haven’t the patience for games like that. What had made her piss? Had it been fear or a muscular spasm? Either way, I’d thought that Habiba was a human fruit, ripe and ready to be picked, or lying rotten on the ground. But I’d made a mistake. For me, at least, the fruit was not yet ripe.

  15

  My mother bought me a jacket, two shirts and a pair of trousers for the start of term at teacher training college. When I told her what had happened with Habiba, she said:

  ‘I’m sure you know what’s best for you.’

  The demon of literature had begun to take possession of me, and I was discovering I was more interested in literature than in educational psychology and educational planning. My greatest interest was the Arabic language. We had a good Arabic literature teacher. He’d write a text on the blackboard, and after he’d explained what it meant, he’d take it apart to show us its grammatical structure. He was a practising Moslem, but he had a good sense of humour too – in his left hand he held the world, and in his right the hereafter. On Fridays, in one of the small mosques, he’d lead the people in prayer and preach a sermon. In the evening he’d go out for a night on the town, in Rincón or Sebta. I went with him sometimes, in his old car. He used to keep a mousetrap under the back seat. He was convinced that he had mice living in his car. It must have been a clever mouse, because it only ate part of the food he put there.

  The teacher who taught us educational theory and psychology caught me reading Les Misérables and threw me out, shouting:

  ‘This is supposed to be a classroom, not a reading room!’

  I began to frequent the Café Continental. It had a relaxed air about it and you could see from the faces of its clientele that most of them were fairly well-off. The 49,000 francs which I’d received as my grant was a considerable amount in the 1960s. I gave part of it to my mother and kept the rest for myself. I divided my time between reading in Arabic and reading in Spanish, and having a good time round the bars. The Bar Rebertito, with its walls decorated with bulls’ heads, was the best-looking bar of all of them. I enjoyed the songs I heard over the sound system in the Continental. Two songs that I never tired of listening to were Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’ and ‘Bésame Mucho’ by Antonio Matshin.

  There was one particularly striking man in the café. He was elegant and seemed to command the respect of the rest of the clientele. He generally had a group of people around him, all as chic and prosperous-looking as himself. I asked someone:

  ‘Who’s that man?’

  ‘You really don’t know? He’s the writer Mohamed el Sabbagh.’

  ‘What does he write?’

  ‘Poetry. Free verse, mostly.’

  I bought some of his books: The Thirst of the Wounded, The Paralysis of the Hunting Dog, The Tree of Fire, The Moon and I (the last two translated into Spanish) and some shorter books. I read them in two days flat. I told myself that if people respected those who wrote like that, then I would write like that too – or even better. So writing did have its advantages … I had no idea that writers might actually be seen in public places and might speak to ordinary people, the way that Mohamed el Sabbagh did in the café. I always imagined that writers were either very private people or they were dead. I settled down and wrote three pages of text. I called my piece of nonsense ‘The Garden of Shame’.

  I began to watch Mohamed el Sabbagh. Eventually, one day, I saw him sitting on his own, drinking his usual instant coffee. I went over to him, nervously:

  ‘Are you Mohamed el Sabbagh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve read your books and I like them a lot. I want to be a writer too. This is the first thing ‘I’ve written. I wonder, would you mind taking a look at it and telling me what you think of it?’

  He tucked my three pages into his pocket. I said goodbye and left the café so he wouldn’t feel I was pressurizing him.

  At midday the café was almost empty. He was in the habit of calling in for a coffee before going on to work in the public library. He gave me back my writing the following day, saying:

  ‘Your language is not bad at all. Carry on writing. Try to be disciplined and read a lot.’

  I took to drinking coffee with him while I told him bits and pieces about my life in Tangier, my studies in Larache and my course at the teacher training college. He gave me suggestions for good poetry to read in Arabic and Spanish: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Gabriel Mistral and Rafael Alberti … And I discovered for myself the romantic purity of the women poets: Rosalía de Castro, Emily Dickinson (translated into Spanish), Susanna Marsh, Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni. Some of them had written more than one book, and there was I still struggling to write a single decent sentence. A story from Morocco, by Ahmed Abdeslam el Baqali, was the first thing I’d read by a Moroccan writer.

  A newspaper published a short prose piece of mine, ‘The Stream of My Love’, with a picture. I was wildly happy and I got drunk to celebrate my hidden literary talents. I bought several copies of the paper and distributed them among my fellow students to make sure they realized I was now an important person. I was impressed: a son of the shanty town and the human dunghill writes literature and they publish him! So as to increase the sense of my own self-importance, I treated myself to a good jacket and a pair of trousers, plus a selection of bow ties and a fake gold wrist chain. Vanity and inflated self-opinion got the better of me and I abandoned the popular cafés in the Feddane, Trancats and the Barrio Maliqa, and began to frequent the patio of the Hotel Nacional and a dance hall called the ‘Marvel’. I began to hang out at the Café Continental and the Bar Labara. I shaved once and sometimes twice a day, which wasn’t too good for my skin. I began to use scent, to the extent of carrying round a small scent bottle in my pocket. Ibn el Baraka and Ashir el Fi’ran were chic, were civilized and were progressive … I’d shed my old skin and grown a new one. And what about inspiration …? Oh yes! A very necessary thing, inspiration. Imagine it – me, a son of the gutter, seeking inspiration …!

  One day I followed a young brunette. I knew where she lived, and her family background. I began to shadow her every time I saw her, or I’d watch her from in front of her house or in front of her aunt’s house. A friend of the daughter of a Moroccan political leader. She was called Halima and was a neighbour of Habiba and a friend of my sister Arhimo. She was illiterate but she was brunette and pretty. Maybe she’d inspire me to writing gypsy poems, but she was too passive to inspire me to anything greater. I was used to women made of sterner stuff.

  Habiba gave me a key to her flat, so I came and went as I pleased. Sometimes she didn’t spend the night at her place. More than once I saw her in a car, or walking down the street in the company of someone I didn’t know, in the area of Nazhat Jadid! She would pretend not to have seen me. Fair enough – that was her business. She vanished and didn’t reappear until the following Tuesday. She had traces of a blue bruise over her left eye. A heavy blow. Someone was giving her a hard time. My sister Arhimo contracted pulmonary TB. My father and my brother Abdelaziz were also coughing violently. A total epidemic in our family. Malika and I were the only ones unaffected. My mother had recovered but she was still under medical supervision at home. My father was the only one being treated without supervision.

  Habiba disappeared again, this time for a couple of days. I decided to move to the Hotel Black Jewel. It was a small family hotel run by two Spaniards, Rosario and Carrion, who were brother and sister. Twenty thousand francs a month, one small room and three meals a day. I presumed that Habiba was having an unhappy love affair with someone.

  I visited Arhimo and Abdelaziz in hospital. Arhimo bu
rst out crying – a woman had died in her room, so she’d got it into her head that anyone who fell ill would die. By this time our mother was pretty much bed-ridden.

  I accompanied Mohamed el Sabbagh to his flat in the old part of town. The ambience of a person devoted to his art. Grapes, apples and pears in a large metal bowl; a subdued light that deepened the effect of the poetic silence. Chopin: ‘The Nights of Majorca’, and reading letters by Mikhail Nu’imah. I came out from his house wishing that I had a refuge like that. He went through my writings and corrected them, using words that were finely sculpted, transparent – but he was clay of one kind and I was clay of another. He didn’t have to eat the garbage of the rich. He didn’t have lice like me. His ankles weren’t all sore and bleeding. I wasn’t capable of writing about the milk of small birds, and touches of angelic beauty, and grapes of dew, and the paralysis of hunting dogs, and the songs of nightingales …

  I called on Habiba to give her back the key to her flat. She looked pale, tired and desperate. Her voice sounded tense and hoarse:

  ‘Why did you go? What upset you?’

  She looked as if she’d been crying.

  ‘I didn’t want to be a bother to you.’

  ‘You weren’t a bother at all.’

  On the taifor stood two empty beer bottles and a pack of Virginia cigarettes. A new worry was starting to get her down. She seemed on the edge of collapse. Even her aunt was refusing to see her, saying that Habiba was shameless. Her aunt was married to the foreman at a local garage. Habiba didn’t have any other women friends. I suggested going to get something we could drink together. Her face lit up. I wanted to see her looking happier. Her sadness reminded me of Fatima in Larache when her daughter Salwa had fallen sick. Salwa and a winter’s day in an empty park. Salwa whom I had not seen since.

  I stopped Habiba reaching for her purse. There was a hint of a smile, and then the smile opened out and her face became young and beautiful again. We would have supper together. Lamb with artichoke and chickpeas. A cool, invigorating breeze was blowing and it was drizzling.

  I went into a Spanish wine shop for a glass of sherry. Two middle-aged Spaniards were chatting about the art of bullfighting and how it had deteriorated into commercialism. They sighed over José Barandas, and Marcial Lalanda (Chiquillo) the Brave, and Francisco Peralta, and Joselito El Gallo, and Manuel Mejías Rapela (Bienvenida), and Juan Luis de Larousa (a fascist who’d been killed in Barcelona at the start of the Spanish Civil War) and Manolete El Azim. When the discussion started getting heated, the owner of the wine shop stepped in to referee and calm things down.

  I had a second glass and went out to buy a bottle of white wine. I thought about Habiba as I walked back: it was probably best for her not to go falling in love again, in case she ended up going back to her crazy dancing in the hospital and in the streets of Sebta. But then again, maybe she found it a good way of relaxing and letting off steam in this rootless life of hers. Her last divorce had robbed her of most of her self-respect and she’d never really had the chance to develop beyond the age of 25. She’d had her four children like a rabbit: twins first, and the other two in quick succession. In order to manage the housework, she used to tie the kids’ legs to the end of the bed, the settee or the table, to keep them apart so they wouldn’t scratch each other or snatch pieces of biscuit from each other. She’d never had the chance to live a decent life. It had been bad luck all the way and she’d had to steal the few moments of happiness that she’d had.

  A delicious smell of cooking wafted from the kitchen and pervaded the flat. The room had a happy, bustling air. Her words began to wipe away the dust of sorrow from her face. We drank toasts to this and that, and there was a warm feeling between us. She was smiling, as if she was really enjoying herself. She had prepared meat with artichoke and chickpeas, which was her favourite dish. I ate it and it was delicious. She called it the ‘First Vizier’.

  She looked at me tenderly and said:

  ‘I haven’t found anyone else who understands me the way you do.’

  ‘We shouldn’t trust too much in happiness. It’s a fleeting thing, disappearing the moment we try and catch hold of it. It’s like a beautiful little bird that lands on the edge of a balcony. No sooner do we approach it than it flies away. Do you believe that this little bird is going to land on your shoulder, or mine, and sing for us?’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘So maybe this is happiness, then: instead of the bird landing on your shoulder to sing, it stays on the edge of the balcony and sings there.’

  She agreed with me and, sighing happily, seemed more relaxed.

  ‘You’re right.’

  I was also comforting myself with the thought that my life was no more wonderful than hers.

  16

  It was a fresh, breezy morning as I left Habiba’s house. I felt as light as a feather, as if I was walking on air. She was still asleep. The door clicked shut behind me. My trousers were still slightly damp.

  I ordered breakfast in the Café General Yazid. There was an old wind-up His Master’s Voice gramophone in one corner, dating from the 1940s. The records they used to play were mainly Om Kaltoum, Asmahan, Abdel Wahab and Farid el Atrache. They kept the gramophone as a kind of memento of things past, a testimony to their memories and the culture of earlier days.

  I decided to wait until my mother went off to sell her secondhand clothes in Bab et Toute and my father went, as usual, to the Feddane, complete with more cock-and-bull stories about his so-called bravery in Franco’s war. His friends in the Feddane, like himself, had been deserters in Franco’s war. His stories were all lies. The only time my father was ever brave was in his war with us, and he began to lose that war once we started growing up.

  When he could no longer trash us, he would sometimes beat our mother, to the point of drawing blood or giving her a black eye, or two. One day he’d beaten her so hard that it had exhausted him. At that point he’d lifted the metal pot in which he boiled the sugar needed for making the honey that he sold in Sebta. If it hadn’t been for my mother’s screams alerting the neighbours, he would have tipped the contents over her head. When the neighbours came, I grabbed the pestle from the mortar and threatened to smash his head with it if he started his craziness again. He rushed round to the man next door and burst out crying:

  ‘The bastard threatened to kill me. He threatened me with the mortar. I should have strangled him when he was little, that would have sorted him out!’

  I had a sudden vision of my brother Abdelqader’s blood spurting out when my father had wrung his neck. However, that was the last time he hit my mother. From then on, he confined himself to abusing her and cursing us.

  I found Arhimo coughing feverishly. When her coughing stopped, she cooed like a dove. My mother had left her some orange juice, saying it would do her good. I washed my trousers, shaved and then went and bought one of Abdelaziz’s little cakes. When I told him I hoped business would be good that day, he answered jokingly:

  ‘Well, you’re the first customer I’ve had today, so let’s hope you bring me luck.’

  He kissed my small coin and put it in his pocket. We smiled at each other and I left. As I was setting off down the road, I heard Fatima, our hunchbacked neighbour, calling after me. She said good morning and I greeted her in return. Then she disappeared. She had a pretty wretched time with her handicap. She used to cheer herself up reading cheap paperback romances, and writing love letters for her women friends who didn’t know how to write such things. She was the public scribe, for all the goings-on, big and small, in our street. I realized that all the aspirations and all the wealth of the people who lived in these shacks lay in their dreams. Poor people are the world’s true dreamers. In their hovels they dream about making loads of money, and eating big dinners, and holding noisy parties until they pass out with singing and dancing.

  I didn’t know why I was in such a good mood that morning, especially after what had happened with Habiba.
I called round to the English bookshop and read a bit of Jane Eyre. Then I went to the Café Feddane. I joined a man playing cards with two others. The stake was the price of a cup of tea. My partner said he’d cover me if I lost. We won, then we lost, and then we won again.

  After a while my head was dizzy with the card-playing and the kif, so I went to the Café Awmainu (in Rif dialect: ‘my brother’) in Trancats. I hadn’t been there since I came back from Oran in 1951. There I found Comero and Batati. We embraced warmly. Ten years had passed since the day of our memorable fight. We played backgammon for a while, and poured eau de vie from a hidden bottle and drank it from a small glass. I tucked myself into a space by the stove to drink my glass. You could see from their faces that they were heavy drinkers. Comero was working as a doorman at the post office. Batati had been working as a co-driver on a lorry until he’d managed to fall off the back. He’d broken his leg, and now he walked with a visible limp. Comero said, jokingly:

  ‘I reckon he fell on purpose, so’s he could claim on the insurance and retire on the proceeds. He’s so lazy it’s unbelievable! Don’t you remember what he’s like? Have you ever seen him do an honest day’s work? His speciality used to be robbing his father, but when his father died he didn’t know how to rob anyone else, so he had to get a job.’

  I smiled and didn’t say anything. I thought: Batati was robbing his father in the café when he took over from him at siesta time, but you were a dab hand at robbing the rest of them!

  Comero asked me:

  ‘What about you? What have you been up to? We heard you’ve been studying in Larache.’