Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  In houses and in hospitals, long live love.

  In peace and in war, long live love.’

  Mansour was sitting near me, enjoying the smell of a flower with childlike simplicity.

  ‘It’s not easy for a man to go mad; and it’s difficult to become wise enough not to go mad.’

  Yusuf said:

  ‘People’s understanding is a burden and their bodies are their donkeys. Once I saw a porter load his donkey cart with sack after sack, until the cart collapsed and the donkey collapsed too. He was trying to cut down on how many times he had to return to load up. A step is a step, but who is able to take that step? Everyone is scared of an imaginary chasm that they have before them. We fall before we walk. How tall are the trees, but how short are people! Truly the secret of life lies in the secret of growth.’

  After we’d had our fill of sunshine and fresh air and the clear blue sky, we went back to our room.

  Abraham came in. He wouldn’t leave us alone until one of us gave him something to eat. I gave him a chunk of bread and some olives. He was always hungry, no matter how much you gave him. Bread and olives was one of my favourite foods too. Abraham swallowed more than he chewed. He hardly chewed at all. He was tall and sturdily built, and at night they’d take it in turns to go and have sex with him. He never complained unless the rape was accompanied by a beating. And what they did afterwards was even more revolting: they’d bring the hospital dog and get it to lick his backside, where it was streaked with blood. Mansour asked him:

  ‘What’s your girlfriend’s name, Abraham?’

  Most of the time he talked about her without needing to be asked.

  ‘Esther.’

  ‘What do you think of her eyes?’

  ‘She has the most beautiful eyes.’

  ‘Are they still beautiful?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lying, Abraham. Time has made you blind. Do you really still love her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lying, Abraham. Love dies too. Either she’s gone with another man or she’s dead.’

  Yusuf toyed with his beard and said:

  ‘When men are on their own, they can be saints, but put them with women and they become the very devil. Some people count the passing of the days and others count the beats of their hearts; some grieve over their former days of beauty and others drive their cars looking backwards. The most beautiful things in this world finish up wrecked and crushed. This is a truth which I heard from a dumb man. O doctor of healing, why are you afflicted with leprosy …? O eye doctor, why is your eyesight so bad …?’

  Between one wing and another, there lies flying!

  They transferred me to another wing when a spare room became free – a private wing for civil servants and people with special privileges. Some of the patients used to come round from the wards to enjoy the peace and calm in our wing.

  I discovered that some of my things were disappearing while I was out of my room. Everything that was eatable, smokable or drinkable started to vanish. Even the bottle of Martini disappeared out of my bag. I had a permit enabling me to leave the hospital grounds, so I was able to go into town to buy the things I needed. Nobody touched my books or magazines or newspapers. Once I came across a patient scoffing my private food and he shouted across to me from the hospital entrance:

  ‘Come and have some. It’s very good.’

  I thanked him and left him to finish what must have been a pretty delicious meal: a farm chicken with onion and raisins. I let him eat his fill. He finished off with a banana and an orange, and afterwards he asked for a cigarette.

  Damnati was the strongest patient in the hospital and he’d been there for over ten years. He’d previously worked in a German circus, where his act was an acrobatic routine that involved carrying six fully grown adults. He wasn’t the longest-term resident in the hospital, though. Shama had been there for even longer: fifteen years. She’d got pregnant in the hospital three times, nobody knew by whom. When her sister visited her, she’d spit at her and insult her and then refuse to talk to her.

  Mizmizi was brought back to hospital one morning with his head bandaged and his face all cut. He was one of the patients who was allowed to come and go as he pleased. He’d been in treatment for more than five years. He wasn’t rough or aggressive with people. His problem was that he was stirred to craziness by the sight of broken objects. He was the one who took care of the hospital bitch, washing her and feeding her, and being friendly and playing with her. When he spent a few days in town, he’d sometimes get bored and head-butt one of the de luxe shop windows. And when he was particularly crazy, he’d chew bits of glass and razor blades, and in fact he did eventually die after swallowing a lump of glass. He quite often drank wine and smoked kif and swallowed tranquillizers, and in his actions he tended to project the state of his world onto others. He didn’t live his tragedy on his own, unlike most of the other patients, who retreated into their own little worlds and suffered in isolation. It was extraordinary how cruel they could be to themselves! Mizmizi thought of the hospital as his real home. Nobody ever visited him. He had more friends in the hospital than he had on the outside. There was another patient who had no visitors either. He was a porter at the railway station, and he only came into hospital during the winter because that was the time when he was more or less unemployed.

  With a view to putting an end to people pilfering my belongings, I asked Damnati to guard my room. He would sit in front of my door, idly thumbing through my magazines and newspapers, and smoking cigarettes which he rolled himself. I bought him a packet every two or three days, and I’d give him some of my food. Sometimes he’d take a book and pretend to be reading it, page by page, muttering aloud as he read, although in fact he couldn’t read a single word. One day he asked me to read out loud to him. After a few paragraphs he stopped me:

  ‘I used to read like that too, when I was in elementary school.’

  When his poor mother visited him, which was every week or two, he’d act out celebrating his birthday with her. He’d sit on her knee as if he was her little boy, and shower her head and hands with kisses. He’d return to his seat for a moment or two and then begin the routine all over again. If any of the new patients happened to be passing and stared at them, they’d be rewarded with a punch in the face – a punch that was powerful but not usually enough to knock them unconscious. The older patients knew of his insane jealousy, so they gave him a wide berth. Damnati’s punishment would be two or three days in solitary confinement in the high-security wing. Since I came to the hospital I’d saved him from it on two occasions – this involved paying the sum of 10 dirhams to the head nurse each time.

  It was even possible to have sex with some of the female patients, paying in dirhams or whatever they happened to need. The hospital didn’t need professional prostitutes coming in. During the night Damnati’s madness took the form of guarding the toilets. The first time he did it, he stopped all the patients going in by lashing out and trying to hit them. Nothing could be done about it because the guard and the male night-duty nurse were nowhere to be found – they were presumably asleep or playing cards. In the morning, people were vomiting all over the place because they couldn’t stand the smell of the patients who’d shat in their clothes and their beds. This time they put Damnati on electric shock treatment, to calm him down, as well as two days’ solitary confinement. On the third day I freed him by the usual means, with a 10-dirham bribe. In fact outbursts of this kind were fairly rare with him.

  I cut out pictures of naked girls from Playboy magazine and stuck them up round my room. The room had a small window looking down onto a grassy yard where the female patients walked during their recreation periods. They would chatter among themselves, or in scattered groups, or on their own. They would comb each other’s hair and go through the motions of delousing each other, even if there wasn’t a flea among them. When you watched the way they moved, they really did look like monkeys. When an argument br
oke out among them, they had a habit of baring their genitals. They’d grab each other’s hair and pull it, and scratch and kick like furies. Whenever there was a fight, the others wouldn’t step in to separate them, and if the warders didn’t arrive in time the fighting would spread like wildfire. During the four months I spent in the hospital, I witnessed many scenes of violence between them, over the stupidest little things: someone asking someone else for a comb, or arguing over a place to sit, or because someone happened to look at someone else. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ One particular woman always went off on her own. She used to strip off her clothes and then start combing her hair distractedly. She came up to my window and asked for a cigarette. I gave her two or three, so as to stop her coming back. I didn’t want to deprive her of her nakedness, or stop her smelling the bunch of flowers that she’d somehow managed to find.

  At night another figure would materialize in the hospital. There were always one or two patients who couldn’t get to sleep. The Virgin would often come to visit me during the hours of darkness, sometimes tearful and sometimes ecstatically happy. She came in wearing a flimsy nightdress. She was short and stocky, with her hair cut short. Her face was youthful and her complexion wheat-coloured. She had a neurosis because she was infertile. She was afraid she’d go mad.

  ‘I know that I’m here, but this isn’t the right place for me.’

  She’d say this with a sigh. She drank and smoked eagerly, as a way of calming her tension. For her I could always spare some cigarettes and a drink or two. One night she stripped naked and struck a pose in imitation of one of the pin-up girls on my wall.

  ‘Is she prettier than me?’

  ‘Not at all – but you’re not like her and she’s not like you.’

  Sometimes she’d ask me to put on dance music for her, so I would, and she’d begin to dance, caressing her pretty body obsessively. She’d coyly take off some of her clothes and begin writhing on the bed like a snake. It was as if she was making love to her body, and she danced until the dancing tired her. Then she’d fling herself onto the bed, motionless. She sometimes stayed until it was almost morning, or she’d leave suddenly without saying goodbye. Her whole existence was wrapped up in the child she wasn’t able to have.

  One morning Dr Monserrat summoned me to his office:

  ‘In my opinion the state of your health would have justified you staying for a week at most, but you’ve been here for four months now. I think you’ve had long enough. I’m not running a hotel, you know. It’s about time you got back to work.’

  The Virgin began dancing and singing in a loud voice on my last night. The male duty nurse and the night warder came and took her back to her dormitory. The duty nurse had sex with her. When I went looking for her during the night, I found him on top of her in the laundry room. He said:

  ‘She’s all yours when I’ve finished.’

  I slipped 10 dirhams into his hand and for a moment he slowed his humping.

  21

  Sarah came from Larache to Tangier having slept with half the Spanish army in town, and after them the Moroccans. Her mother was Jewish and she’d married a Spaniard, but she hadn’t renounced her religion, even though she wasn’t a regular synagogue-goer. Her mother had seen her share of sexual goings-on in her youth. The Hotel Arcadia was the sum total of Sarah’s wealth. She’d sold her bracelets, her rings and her gold chain to buy the deeds of the place, and she’d replaced her jewellery with paste imitations.

  My neighbour at the time was a Danish actor by name of Henning. Both of us left our doors wide open. I was hoping to strike lucky with a woman and he was hoping for a man. Either one of us might have got our way because that’s how it is with Tangier nights – full of passing surprises.

  He sat reading classical drama, while I read whatever came to hand. He was going back over roles that he’d performed in Denmark more than ten years previously. I didn’t understand a single word, but I found it quite moving to watch his performance and listen to the sound of his voice. One night he was kneeling down, playing a part, and when he stood up again he had tears in his eyes.

  If we had no luck with our waiting, we’d keep each other company, either in my room or in his, and we’d share a jug of wine to pass the time. He was very emotional and highly strung.

  On very hot days he was in the habit of standing stark naked in front of the mirror. On his 50th birthday he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He drank himself more or less into a stupor, and as we carried him to bed he was mumbling like a kid:

  ‘Leave me alone, you bastards!’

  He was dependent on his aunt for his income. He had a monthly allowance from her, which gave him enough to be able to live in Tangier, or somewhere like it, for the rest of his days. Death terrified him. Once I found him crying in his room just because a funeral cortège had passed in front of his hotel. (In the late 1960s he suffered a brain haemorrhage in Melilla, and died and was buried there.)

  I told him:

  ‘If we want to conquer the idea of death, the important thing is not to imagine ourselves as dead. A person’s destiny lies within himself. Don’t depend on anyone and don’t expect anyone to console you. Imagine that you’re immortal. The only thing that defeats death is a love of life.’

  This seemed to cheer him up a bit because he came right back at me:

  ‘You must think I’m naive. What do you think this is, the theatre?’

  Henning didn’t seem to realize how sick he was. The slightest pain made him shudder.

  Five or six of the permanent residents usually had lunch and supper in the hotel’s small dining-room-cum-kitchen. Our cook, Lala Safiya, served the meals. When Sarah was in the mood, she’d serve us herself, and then she’d come and join us at our table. Lola, her mother (her real name was Hassiba), never joined us for anything. She just stayed in her gloomy room. Sometimes she played cards with herself. Hardly anyone ever visited her.

  One day we were joined at our table by a character whom I’d seen at the café in the Inner Souq. I had no idea who he was. He had a kind of superior air about him, and I decided that he was just trying to give the impression of being someone important. He was a friend of one of Sarah’s lovers – the black man Boutami, who was big-built with a face the size of half a melon, a narrow forehead and eyes like black grape-pips.

  This newcomer wasn’t staying in our hotel. As the days passed he seemed unable to break the ice with us. We would sit there joking and laughing, and he’d just scowl. I thought maybe he was wanting us to cheer him up. That night we finished supper and had a few drinks, and then we started telling jokes. By the end we were almost in tears from laughing so much, and then, all of a sudden, he got up and went stomping out. Hell, what happened to that kangaroo!

  The next day he was the first person into the dining room. I found him thumbing through a French magazine, and in front of him lay an object wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. I said hello as I sat down and he responded with a curt nod. Then he bowed his head in silence again. I thought he looked like he was pretending to be Rodin’s ‘Thinker’. I almost burst out laughing. Lala Safiya was looking extremely worried, which wasn’t like her at all. The door of the restaurant faced Lola’s room. Sarah sometimes slept there with Lola when her boyfriend wasn’t spending the night with her in the hotel. She came out and waved to me to come across. Something was obviously the matter. She ushered me into the room:

  ‘What did you do to upset him? Don’t you realize he’s a big-shot policeman and a friend of Boutami’s?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘That thing wrapped in newspaper is a gun. Lala Safiya saw him bring it out and polish it.’

  ‘So what’s this got to do with me? Is he making trouble, giving you a hard time?’

  ‘Of course not … but don’t go doing anything to upset him. I hope you can just eat quietly together until you get used to him.’

  ‘Or he gets used to us.’

  ‘I hope I’ve made myself clear. I don’
t want problems, you understand?’

  Sarah is the kind of person who shits herself when she has to deal with the authorities.

  The elderly day porter, Don Juan, used to sit in a corner of the hallway. He was always teasing Sarah and cracking jokes about her. It amazed me how he got away with it, but then again he probably had nothing to lose. Once, when we were having supper together, he said, in his cheerful, mocking way:

  ‘I see this chicken had no legs. Presumably it flew about all the time.’

  On his plate was a wing and the neck of a chicken. He’d been working for Sarah for the best part of ten years.

  On this particular day, around the table were Bouzian the English teacher, Henning, the police officer and myself. Don Juan didn’t eat with us when he was in a bad mood – he’d wait until the restaurant was empty. Sarah looked in on us and then disappeared, looking worried and obviously waiting to see what would happen. Lala Safiya was more upset than her. She’d never seen a real gun in someone’s hand before.

  ‘He was polishing it like a pair of glasses!’ she told me.

  There was a brooding silence, which was unusual for us. Henning didn’t know about the wrapped-up revolver. Sarah poured out the wine for us and then took the bottle back to the kitchen. Henning ordered another bottle, in an attempt to break the silence. He seemed worried that something was about to happen that night. He was probably miserable about his boyfriend too – they’d split up a few days previously. He seemed to take love more seriously when he was depressed than when he was in a good mood. He poured the policeman a drink with a shaking hand and then proceeded to pour drinks for us. We clinked glasses. Sarah and Lala Safiya seemed slightly less worried now and they watched us with strained smiles. I don’t know why, but it struck me that Sarah looked like an ostrich. Was this on account of her long neck? Or maybe the fact that she had a heart-shaped face? The policeman ordered another bottle before the previous one was finished. He was trying to be friendly and he surreptitiously tucked his bundle away in the pocket of his coat.