3. Huge US bases were set up – for instance at Tarragona and Zaragoza – as well as a large amount of economic aid being provided.
4. Franco used to paint as a pastime. His favourite subject was sunken ships.
18
They gave me a post at the mixed school in Hayy Jadid. I was given the preparatory class to teach. The classroom stood next to the playground. It was more or less a wooden shed, and it leaked in the winter and had frogs croaking round it. More than forty pupils per class – less than a quarter were girls. This was education at absolute rock bottom. Pure misery: dirt, hunger and sickness. I picked up a pencil and asked the class:
‘What is this?’
With one voice they replied:
‘What is this?’
‘This is a pencil.’
They replied:
‘This is a pencil.’
‘And this?’
They replied:
‘And this?’
‘This is an exercise book.’
They answered:
‘This is an exercise book.’
One of the pupils vomited up the remains of some olives. Another one said: ‘That’s because he eats olives with his father, sir. His father’s a drunkard.’
One of the boys kissed one of the girls in class, and she was upset about it. So as to restore her self-respect, I told her to kiss him back. At that she stopped crying.
There was such ignorance around at the start of the ‘60s. The education system was terrible. Some of the children didn’t have pencils or exercise books. They didn’t eat regularly either. There was one boy who was particularly idiotic. The others called him ‘Tamkhukh’. He always insisted on sitting right in the front row, in any seat that took his fancy. When he wasn’t busy hitting people or biting them he kept the class amused. He had big teeth and a mongoloid face. Sometimes he threw paper pellets and chalk at me while I was writing on the blackboard. Once I punished him by rapping him over the knuckles with a ruler, and he glared at me furiously and started to shake. From that moment I tried my best to ignore him. The little beast was enjoying himself. I put in a report to the school office and I made it clear that my work was becoming impossible because of him. The headmaster’s response was:
‘It’s probably better for him to stay with us at school, rather than running round bothering people in the street.’
Tamkhukh had this habit of going and standing right in front of buses, in the middle of the road, so they couldn’t get by. The conductor would have to get off and give him money, or something to eat, or make jokes with him before he’d let the bus pass.
In the classroom he used to pretend to be a steam engine, while the rows of pupils behind him were his carriages. ‘Chuff, chuff, chuff … Wooh, wooh …’ The whole class fell about laughing. He would doze off during lessons or wander in and out as he fancied. Sometimes he went out and didn’t come back, and that always put me in a good mood. When he was absent for more than a day I found myself praying that he wouldn’t come back at all, but unfortunately he invariably did.
I had a visit from an inspector doing his rounds. I complained about Tamkhkukh’s stupid behaviour. He didn’t believe that any boy could be that idiotic, so he went up to him and ran his hand gently through his coarse, unkempt hair:
‘Why are you making all this trouble at school?’
No sooner had he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder than Tamkhukh pounced on it and bit it. The class cackled with laughter until I silenced them with a glare, even though I was struggling to stop laughing myself. This was the last straw – it led to Tamkhukh being expelled from the school, but nobody could stop him wandering round the area and standing in the way of buses and cars and motorbikes. After he’d been thrown out, the other pupils began to feel sorry for him.
In the end I realized that I wasn’t cut out for the job. I lacked the necessary patience, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. After I’d done my certificate (three years of secondary studies at that time), a committee came to the Abdullah secondary school in Larache and set us an intelligence test. My results put me in the batch that were recommended for termination of their studies because they were too old. Officially my age was 20, but in fact I was 25.
I moved back into the Hotel La Balata. Maybe I was trying to revive memories of Rabi’a and Kunza. I opted for a small room on the roof, with a window that looked out over the sea and the rooftops of the old city. Next door was Tomás El Rojo, in his wooden shack. He lived the life of a spider. He hated Franco to his very soul.
‘They used to say that Franco was clever at hunting down “the boars and the rabbits”, but that’s not true; he was only clever at killing the noblest of the people. It was his hunting friends and their servants who killed the day’s catch, and then they’d put them at his feet and he’d have proud photos taken of them. He also used to paint sunken ships, although with no obvious talent. How was it possible for someone who claimed a love of art to have banished Picasso? They say he was also an admirer of Valle-Inclán, but he authorized the killing of Lorca, and he imprisoned Miguel Hernandez until he died, leaving his wife on her own, nursing their son Basil at her breast.’1 This was what Tomás used to say.
Tomás lived on his own and spent his time either in his hut or on the street. He considered the Spaniards to be a nation of mental defectives – all TV, games of cards, drinking and so on. During the day he sold children’s balloons on the Boulevard, and at night he read the classics – novels in Russian, French, Spanish and English. He drank cheap white wine and smoked Mafrum tobacco. Before going to bed he drank from a bottle of water mixed with lemon juice. He never liked discussing anything in depth – in fact his opinions were confined to a view that nothing was completely bad and nothing was completely good. He didn’t like people who analyse things from A to Z, ‘from honey to ashes’, as he used to say.
I envied him his solitude. He was almost a personification of solitude, a kind of death in life. He was well past 70 by the time I knew him, but luckily he enjoyed good health. He was of the opinion that bullfighting had come to an end with the death of Joselito and Manolete, and he liked Jota El Aragonesa, and the fandango, and the Carlos Gardel tango, and Concha Piquer, despite her sympathies for General Franco. Sometimes we would share a bottle of wine in his dusty hut. Señora Josefina, the owner of the hotel, cleaned the rooms herself, but Tomás would only let her enter his hut to change the bedding. He said she was nosey and a gossip, and he found the smell of her perfume nauseating.
Rabi’a married an officer in the Moroccan army. They got engaged in Tangier. Kunza was dancing in the Kutubiya night club.
The good old days of prostitution in Tangier came to an end. The brothels that were subject to medical supervision were banned years ago. The older and more decrepit prostitutes began to set up shop in backstreet houses and cheap hotels, serving newcomers arriving from the countryside looking for work, and the poor of the city, at lower prices. Some of them gave up prostitution, out of respect for religion and their advancing years, and began working in restaurants, and hotels, and the houses of the nouveaux riches. Some of them had moustaches and facial hair, and their teeth were falling out. A few of them who had become rich on their earnings bought houses and land from foreigners who were leaving the country and retired to a life of ease. The others, the younger and better-looking ones, emigrated to countries like Spain, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.
By the end of the 1960s a new generation of young prostitutes had come of age, emancipated in their dress, their way of talking and their style. As their bodies matured, they arrived in Tangier from all over Morocco, like a horde of locusts. This was the era of the grand hotels and the night clubs, and of drugs2 and wild sex for Moroccans and foreigners alike.
I was reading every book I could lay my hands on, but I found that literature and psychology interested me most. Wherever I was, I would pull out a pad and write ideas like the following:
Café Central: 25.9.1961
The woman that I choose to live with for life will only be the right woman for me if she can keep me from going with other women. She must be all women to me. No other woman will have what she has. I’ll be able to pick her out from a crowd of other women even in the dark. When the candles go out, each of us will light the other. Even if they cover us with a veil of darkness, I shall see her and she will see me. I have still not found the ideal woman, for she will be a woman of extraordinary light, a woman of transparency.
While I was writing this kind of thing about my ideal woman, I was sleeping with the lowest class of women still to be found in the few remaining brothels in Tangier. There was no soul in my sex at this stage of my life, just physicality, and this was probably my destiny.
I overheard one of these girls saying to her friend:
‘Men are always telling me, “You’re really beautiful.” But I knew that before they came along …’
It seemed to me that woman is always a mirror to herself, from her birth to when her life wanes and she becomes feeble. She starts watching and being aware of her body before men do. Masturbation and cheap sex were what saved me from the trap of falling into unrequited love. I discovered early on that I loved the temperament of the prostitute, but I wouldn’t have been capable of living with one, because prostitutes believe that men are driven by sex and they spend their time trying to bring their men down to the same level as themselves.
1. A reference to the last poem that the poet wrote in prison, ‘Music of the Onion’. It was dedicated to his infant child, after he had received a letter from his wife telling him that the only thing she had to eat was bread and onions.
2. The hippies who arrived in the city in the 1960s played a big role in spreading the use of all kinds of drugs.
19
We should dream a little. In fact, do more than dream. Think of the slave chained to his seat, rowing a galley and being flogged till his back bleeds. He tries to stand up, but bullets riddle his flesh before he can even rise from his seat. Or they shoot him down in the night as he flees. Whether he makes a stand or tries to run, the result is the same.
From whom can I take wisdom today? The intelligent ones have either gone mad or they wander the streets, and the ones who would have had the best claim to stay have emigrated and exile shackles them with her heavy chains. The travail of their journey began even before they left. I watched them savouring their last drinks. I saw one of them carrying a handful of his motherland’s soil in a small bag, keeping it as a memento. He would probably plant seeds in it during his enforced exile. Roots of mint too, perhaps. And himself driven out by his country’s wretchedness. Baynitz used to tell me in Asila that the bad times would be coming. But, I asked him, when had there ever been good times there?
What were those sad melodies that I could hear in the distance? They were music for the departing exiles in the customs sheds, as they crawled towards their destination. Apparently standing, but crawling for all that. The slowness of their progress humiliated them to the core of their being. The shame of their own country was harder on them than the humiliation of their exile. I heard one of them sigh and say: ‘I tell you, this night will bury us here.’ As if the frightening memories of previous nights were all bundled up in the night of this border crossing. I was used to the sun and the sea. How could I live by a sea without sun? Fog has always been a mystery to us. We wonder whether the sky above our land has lost its colour. The sun smiles at us before it smiles at others – but in other countries they cover her up.
Enough of this nonsense. Learn how to dream of other worlds as the people who live in them dream of them. Don’t close yourself in. Often good may come from evil. Their faces may be grim and depressing, but there’s no escaping them.
The new bars in the city are having a terrible effect on us. Even the expressions of the people in them are enough to depress you. An air of tension all the time, and fights. And the bar owners are worse than their clients. How I miss Madame Trudie, and Sir Sar, and the Parade. There’s nobody going round the bars asking if someone will buy them a drink. The old bars were like ‘the tree which covered the whole forest’. They were focal points. But today the new bars are low-life places and their owners are just as bad.
The hour of desire is approaching. It might bring us closer to each other, but how often it takes us apart just when we’re wanting to meet and hold each other. Sometimes I feel like a bull in a bullring, coming out of the darkness of the tunnel into the light, thrusting at the air and flailing its hoofs in the sand, a seething mass of energy, as it prepares to do battle with its allotted destiny. This is life in the time of mistakes. I had been polluted by the night of the streets. Even the decent crazies on the streets have disappeared. They’ve become sensible! They’re taking care of their appearance! This isn’t some big statement about their lives – it’s just surrender. I remember nights dreaming of my faraway home and missing it, nights of missing the streets, and nights of dreaming of distant journeys.
I want to feel that I’m on the move, even if it’s only to the outskirts of the city. Give me the earth and dust of a smooth road! All mornings and the evenings await me there.
I was living in Val Fleuri, near my school. I wrote about everything that was wrong with the city. I railed against it. The city’s splendours that had once enchanted me were now drowned in hubbub and din. It was a long time since I’d seen a sunrise in the city, and the freshness of the morning dew. I knew that I would enjoy waking up to breezes, or gales, or even floods. It didn’t matter. The important thing was the fact of being there. Let’s dream a little more – more than just the memories of our childhood, be they happy or wretched.
In Val Fleuri I found that I was beginning to enjoy nights at home instead of nights in the bars. And mornings of mountains and sea rather than mornings on the panting streets and the cafés waiting for their first customers. The only thing that was missing from my nights with their trees and grass was the howling of wolves.
I discovered Heinrich Heine before I discovered Rimbaud, Verlaine, Nerval, Baudelaire, Shelley, Keats and Byron. I knew Heine’s ‘I love, therefore I live’ before I learned about Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’. Then Sartre came along and planted another concept in me: ‘L’enfer c’est les autres’.
I’d always had a close affinity with internal turmoil. Rousseau’s Confessions taught me how one can gain consolation in the appreciation of the small things that others neglect. But I was getting into a pretty terrible state.
I burned the last of what I had written in Val Fleuri, and went back to my room on the roof of the Hotel La Balata, to sink myself once again into the pollution of the city. I started selling my books, every day, for whatever I could get for them. Then I went and got drunk. I took sick leave, and when I’d sold my books, all I had left was ‘New Pages’ by Rosalía de Castro and a collection of poems by el Mu’tamid ben ‘Abbad.
One night I made public my physical and spiritual bankruptcy. I was in the Brasserie de France. For some reason I was shouting and cursing the Egyptian pharoahs. I threatened the bar owner, saying I’d smash his drinks cabinet if he didn’t call the fire brigade – but they came anyway. I had one more drink and then went with them. I heard the bar owner saying to the waiter:
‘Poor guy, his books have driven him crazy.’
‘I saw him sleeping out one night in a doorway opposite the Bar Monocle. He was using his books as a pillow. May Allah help him!’
20
There were five beds in the room. At night, in the distance, I could hear the sound of cockerels and barking dogs. I was reading a biography of Van Gogh, and how his life had begun with a dream and ended in despair. Everything was completely quiet. Suddenly there was the sound of shouting. It was getting louder as it approached our room, and whoever it was, they were shouting that there’d been an earthquake. I hadn’t noticed anything. I was probably asleep when it happened. A number of patients from the other wards crowded into our room, and needl
ess to say my room-mates woke up one after the other, and all of a sudden everyone was talking about Allah and religion and natural disasters. Yusuf from our room took the lead in the discussion, providing interpretations and explanations. He had memorized the Koran and the hadith. Someone told me that he’d been driven crazy by too much reading. He came out with phrases like: ‘Allah fears his worshippers when they are too learned’ and ‘Death is the greatest truth.’
A man by the name of Mansour said:
‘A day on earth is better than a thousand days under the earth. Give me a thousand years of life until I get fed up with living!’
Another man, Omar, said:
‘That’s quite enough of religion! Bring out the bread and water, and the cigarettes.’
Nobody gave him anything, so he covered his face with his blanket and started cursing us for being so mean.
Yusuf said:
‘People are sinful like their fathers and forefathers. Pain is fair justice. The happiest man is not necessarily the one who is closest to Allah, and the most miserable man is not necessarily the one who is furthest from Allah.’
There was one young boy who was shouting all the time:
‘Cut off my hands. Here they are, cut them off!’
Yusuf said:
‘Passing time is death. They visit the living with the self-same flowers with which they visit the dead. The flowers of happiness are the same as the flowers of grief. People’s hearts have become like butterflies flitting around flowers that have withered.’
When we went out into the grassy yard, Abraham began singing us his song:
‘On earth and in the sky, long live love.
In my country and in exile, long live love.
In prisons and in places of worship, long live love.
In huts and in palaces, long live love.
In alleys and in graveyards, long live love.
Streetwise Page 11