Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  Bouzian was pursuing a romance with a girl student of his. He’d never spoken to her; it was a case of love at a distance. Twice a week he started teaching at 10 in the morning, so on those days he had to leave for Tetuan at 6 o’clock and generally returned three hours later. He would go to the Café Avenue d’Espagne for breakfast, and when his newfound sweetheart passed the café, he got some sort of pleasure out of the fact that he could see her but she couldn’t see him. When he returned tired and listless, we knew that he hadn’t seen her pass that day. Anyway, on those particular days, whether she passed or not, he’d treat us to a bottle or two for supper. He only drank on social occasions. He wasn’t up to drinking on his own: he drank to be sociable, as they say.

  At around 1 in the afternoon a ladder appeared, together with a number of police and firemen, and a murmuring crowd outside. They had to break the window so as to get the door open from the inside. Sarah’s face was pale and she was trembling. She was obviously very worried. Everyone who knew Justine was shocked that she’d committed suicide. She’d been perfectly happy when she’d left us. She’d had a good meal with us and she’d drunk until her cheeks were flushed. I remembered her last smile as she went up the stairs to her room. There were some days when the only food she had was bread soaked in wine. She spent most of her time reading. The cheque she received every month was late. It was getting her down, having to be so dependent on her parents’ allowance. I’d invited her to join us for supper when I found out about her difficulties. I doubt that she committed suicide just because her cheque was late arriving. There must have been a lot of other problems – some much deeper unhappiness. But either way, she’d swallowed several tubes of tranquillizers. Perhaps the fact that she’d unexpectedly had such a good time with us was a contributing factor to her breakdown!

  After the body had been removed and the police had left, Sarah burst into tears. I joined her in a glass of brandy in an attempt to cheer her up. We talked about fate, and people’s destinies, and I forgot all about my school work. We laughed and got drunk together. I ended up in my room, fast asleep in all my clothes, and with no idea how I’d got there. I was woken up by a banging on the door, summoning me to supper. The restaurant had none of the cheerfulness that we managed to create on most nights.

  During the school holidays Bouzian was thoroughly depressed. He was still going to Tetuan and coming back at the same time as usual. There was no sign of his girl student any more, but he was still looking out for her. I took him to Barghoutha’s house. She had three girls and I let him choose. I went in with a girl who happened to know Tetuan, so I was able to talk about some of my haunts in the old days. In Dean’s Bar afterwards I asked him about the girl he’d ended up with.

  ‘She’s a nice kid, but I didn’t want sex with her because she told me the story of why she’s a prostitute and it was rather sad. Apparently she’s got her mother to support and a 1-year-old baby daughter.’

  I can’t stand this kind of prostitute, who bring their worries into bed with them. They’re a disaster …

  Boutami was not Sarah’s only lover, but he was the one who’d stayed with her over the years. Her sexual appetite brought in a variety of young studs from the city and elsewhere – some of them because they were poor and sexually frustrated, and some of them because they had a taste for foreign women, even if they were old like Sarah. On this particular day she had her favourite lover visiting, a young man from Shafshawan. He was in his 30s – younger than her son Carlos. It was Boutami’s custom to spend Saturday evening and Sunday with her, through to Sunday evening. The rest of the week he spent with his wife and three daughters. But this particular day was a Monday. Maybe somebody’d told him there was a rival for her affections, so he’d come to sniff out the competition. Sarah was wearing her best clothes and was dripping with perfume. The young man joined us for supper. You wouldn’t say he was short of an appetite – he was voracious. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. Sarah liked to put on a spread when he was around, so our supper was a real banquet whenever he came. But she had ways of recouping this outlay! I’d heard tell that she’d been seen buying horse meat and donkey meat at the butcher’s. This was probably true, because the meat she fed us was sometimes on the rubbery side, but it didn’t worry me either way. The fact was, our board and lodging with her was among the cheapest in the Inner Souq.

  Boutami went up with Sarah to one of the empty rooms. We heard the sound of shouting and insults. Shortly afterwards Boutami walked past the restaurant door, glaring at the young man furiously. Sarah went into her mother’s room. When she came out, she was wearing dark glasses – to hide a black eye. As a woman she was stubborn, determined, good-looking and not the kind to be defeated. She carried on as if nothing had happened. She was absolutely the mistress of her own freedom and desires. They could quarrel as much as they liked, they could come and they could go, but she was mistress of her own patch. They could get angry and stamp out, but all of them came back in the end because she was a byword for generosity, for good times and good sex.

  22

  Midday, in the middle of summer. Bored. A sensible person would have gone to the sea, but I’m lazy about the sea. Hadn’t been swimming for years. It wasn’t the pleasures of drink that had kept me away from it: it was more the pleasures of serious reading, creative writing and writing letters to friends. Thinking about things and dreaming … I’d even given up taking a siesta because when I sleep in the afternoon I tend to wake up feeling sluggish in the stifling heat.

  On this particular day I had a choice of things to do: I could visit Charles Le Chevalier, or Patricia, or Benito Jarra, who had returned from Mexico. Or I could go to one of the bars down by the beach, but the chattering and babbling of the drunks would just have made the heat worse. So I decided to visit Benito, whom I hadn’t seen since his return.

  He received me barefoot and was as welcoming as ever. He spent most of his time waiting around for the cheques which his rich mother sent him. We embraced warmly. He clapped me on the shoulder:

  ‘The wine hasn’t aged you yet. Seems to be doing you good, in fact.’

  ‘You too – I see the coke hasn’t finished you off yet.’

  His jubbah was open at the front. This time he wasn’t living in a big apartment: he had a single room in Benshouqi, overlooking the shore and part of the harbour, and Hadbat el Cherf, and the railway station. A few books and some sheets of paper lay scattered on the taifor. He took two cold beers from a bowl covered with a piece of sacking:

  ‘This is my fridge.’

  There was a strong smell of hash. He was looking pretty healthy. He always looked like this when he arrived back, but he usually came out in spots when he went back onto sniffing coke, smoking hash, eating majoun and drinking.

  ‘And Valerie?’

  ‘I caught up with her when I was in Las Vegas. She’s married with two kids. She lives with her husband on the Ivory Coast. I reckon that’s about as much as she was looking for. She’s had enough of bust-ups and broken hearts.’

  ‘Patricia’s had a kid too, a daughter, with Giovanni. She hasn’t gone back to living with him but they’re still seeing each other.’

  ‘I knew that. We had breakfast together at the Café Central this morning.’

  I took a peek at the sheets of paper on the taifor.

  ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘A novel. This is my first go at prose. I’m having a hell of a job writing even a page a day. I probably need some crazy woman I can get carried away with. The only thing that helps my writing is when I’m arguing, either with myself or with someone else. I hardly write at all when I’m in a good mood. “A lively mind needs a troubled spirit,” as Alfonsina Storni says.’

  ‘What about Selma? Where’s she now?’

  ‘No idea. I don’t know who dumped who. I didn’t complete my holidays in Las Vegas, because while I was there I met a woman who was a dead ringer for her … same looks, same character. I sucked three poems out of
her and fled before I ended up hating them and tearing them up.’

  He picked up the papers from the taifor and passed them to me.

  23

  I was hating the summer. The heat was stifling and there wasn’t a lot about it that was enjoyable. Even when I had the occasional good idea, the weather was so hot that it made me dizzy and the ideas evaporated like the morning dew. When I was a kid I used to enjoy the summer. I’m the kind who prefers the moist sand of the sea to the dry sand of the desert – I don’t like wind and sand hitting you full in the face so that you can’t see a thing. I’m not the sort to hang onto dreams, except when desires get the better of me, and I only tend to remember my anxieties when I sit down to write.

  I found Le Chevalier sitting and looking depressed out in front of the Café Central. He called me over:

  ‘I want to ask you a favour. I need you to give me a hand with something.’

  This was the first time I’d ever heard him ask anyone round there for help. Evening was drawing on. He got up slowly and said:

  ‘You know, when people like me get old, we find ourselves wishing we could start life all over again.’

  As I sit here writing these notes I’m listening to the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Chopin’s First Nocturne. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how they sound.

  The heat in Le Chevalier’s room was like an oven. There was a bottle of rosé on the table. He only ever drank water when he had no wine. He used to say jokingly that water was only for frogs and camels. He poured me a glass of the wine: it was warm and sour-tasting, and you could smell the cork in it. He pointed to a shabby suitcase near the bed.

  ‘I didn’t really want to trouble you … would you mind carrying this to the beach for me?’

  ‘To the beach?’ I said.

  I wondered whether he was going ga-ga.

  ‘I know it sounds strange, but just do what I ask. I won’t tell you what’s in it – you can see for yourself when we get there.’

  As we walked, he asked me to slow down and wait for him. I’d never seen him as tired and pathetic as this. He was the sort of person who wouldn’t complain even if there really was something wrong with him, but as we went along he stumbled and almost fell. His suitcase wasn’t heavy. I found myself wondering what it could possibly contain. Several people were already on their way home, abandoning the beautiful Tangier evening; others were still enjoying the pleasures of its moist sands. We reached a spot on the beach and I opened the magical suitcase. It had various things in it. Some short stories, some of which he’d read to me previously. They’d never been published. A stack of faded photographs. Medals awarded in two world wars. He asked me to burn the lot without taking anything out of the case. The thought of this upset me. Needless to say, I would do what he asked, but I did ask if I could have one of the photos of him to keep. He was adamant:

  ‘No. Please just do as I ask. Don’t argue. We can take plenty of pictures of you and me together whenever you like.

  As the blackened pages flew about, he gazed across at an evening horizon that was suffused with the colour of almond flowers. Here were memories going back more than sixty years, wiped out without pity or remorse. He seemed on the verge of tears. The redness of his face reflected the turmoil inside him. All of a sudden I began to see him in a new light. All the stories he’d read to me previously had been devoid of any literary imagination. They were simply unadorned accounts of things that had happened in his life. Everything in them was pre-cooked and ready-made. Obviously his isolation didn’t help, as far as developing his literary talents was concerned. He was the kind of person who, when they read or hear something, always want to know whether it’s true.

  He had a particular aversion to going to church on Sundays and saints’ days. By this time the only pleasure he had from life was from the past: for him, the good old days had ended in the late 1940s, despite the disasters of wars large and small. This was his unhappiness. After his retirement from the army he’d decided to take up auto-suggestive therapy. He’d been interested in it when he was younger. As far as I was concerned, it was all hocus-pocus, but I changed my mind when I saw him treat Sarah in my presence. He began by saying things and getting her to repeat them. Then he passed the palm of his hand over her belly, which seemed to take away her pain, to such an extent that she was able to get up from her sick bed.

  Le Chevalier had been our doctor in pain and in sorrow, and now he was the one who was in pain. Once, when I was suffering from anaemia, he had prescribed meatballs of raw horse meat mixed with the yoke of a raw egg, garlic, spices and wine. I understood, through things he said to me, that it’s not possible for people to live with memories that are of failure and betrayal. He had no memories that were worth living for. He’d become alienated from everyone close to him, and they’d effectively killed him off while he was still alive.

  His allowance cheque was more than usually late in arriving. He was getting depressed. He wouldn’t look you in the eye. This was unusual for him. I heard him mumble:

  ‘In the land of promises the poor man died of hunger.’

  I didn’t ask what he meant. As I left I wondered what it would be like to be 75. If it was ordained for me to live that long, I wondered what pleasures or miseries life would have in store for me. That earlier phrase of his kept coming back to me, obsessively: ‘When we get old, we find ourselves wishing we could start life all over again.’ So as to dispel the gathering gloom I told myself that I would never get old like that. I never met anyone of his age who didn’t complain about time robbing him of the things he loved doing, or complaining about life itself. But Le Chevalier wasn’t the kind of person to complain about his lot. I began to dread the end of my life as I saw it foreshadowed in his life. There’s nothing worse than comparing your life with other people’s lives.

  As it turned out, there was a three-week delay in his allowance cheque arriving. The silent drop is the drop which breaks the silence. He had to cut back on food until he was eating only butter, tomatoes, onions and lemons. On most days I got a bottle of wine to share with him, out of sympathy for the poor man having to drink the water that he found so repellent. The French Cultural Centre invited him to give a lecture on auto-suggestive therapy, but his enthusiasm evaporated when he saw only about ten people in the hall, so he shortened his presentation to twenty minutes. This earned him 500 dirhams, which was enough to ward off poverty while he waited for his cheque to arrive. That evening he treated me in the restaurant of the hotel where we lived: food and drink, conversation and jokes, to while away the tedium of the night.

  Last year he was disappointed in one of his ambitions. He was at the Café Zagourah, and he had asked the lady pianist and her violinist husband to accompany him in an old song from the 1930s. As soon as his voice began to ring out, all the passers-by began stopping outside the café. The waiter politely asked him to stop because singing was not allowed. I suppose reality had deserted Le Chevalier because he lived in a world that was foreign to him. He was like a man hanging from a branch over an abyss, weighed down by his burden of sadness.

  He found me at the Café Central enjoying a morning of idleness. His depression had left him. He invited to go with him to visit his friend Georges, in Dahiyat ‘Awama. It was a scorching day and I had nothing better to do with my time, so I went along. He bought a rabbit and some wine, a tin of mushrooms and some barley bread. We took the bus. From the last stop we still had about a kilometre to walk to reach Georges’ little smallholding. The road was scorching hot under our feet. A small snake, about half a metre long, was crossing in front of us. Le Chevalier stopped and struck up a conversation with it:

  He said: ‘Go ahead, you cross first … You were here before us,’ and he told me not to move.

  The sweat was dripping from us. Georges earned his living from keeping bees. Hardly anyone ever visited him except for Le Chevalier, and myself when I went with him. Sometimes I bought honey from him. He was clearly deli
ghted as he welcomed us. It was a tin hut, fairly roomy, that he’d built himself. It was stiflingly hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. His entire wealth consisted of livestock in the shape of cows and chickens. He led an abstemious life. The only furniture he owned was a bed, a table, some chairs and a small radio.

  I felt like strolling in the shade of his orange and pear trees. Some of the pears were over-ripe and several had been eaten into by insects. I ate two that had fallen from the tree. Georges and Le Chevalier cooked the rabbit. I thought it best to leave them alone. Given that they were both of French origin, they had a lot in common. Le Chevalier was an unbeliever and Georges a believer, but they had an understanding. I never once heard them argue about religion. Georges had planted two wooden crosses, one in the field and the other near the well, and over the door of the hut he had another cross, made of dark wood, which looked more like a scarecrow. There was no room for Satan there! I wondered how he could possibly be happy in this almost total isolation. He had no books except for a few faded grey volumes. No sign of any newspapers or magazines. He probably nourished himself with meditation, like saints and hermits. Small birds were flitting between the trees. A black bird sat on a branch. It began to quiver and sing. It was probably a starling. I thought of Aïn Khabbès, and Busatin Kaytan, and the Sirimin fields in Oran. A person is how he ends his life, not how he begins it. That was another of Le Chevalier’s sayings. If I lived that long, I wondered what kind of old age would await me. For sure I wouldn’t end up burning a caseful of my memories on the beach.

  Up until that point, I’d never allowed any emotion to betray me. I’d always lived in a kind of state of emergency. I only loved what was fleeting. Love, in fact, didn’t interest me unless it was big and fantastic, like in a book. I spoke about it without touching it or embracing it. And most of the young women who attracted me were hermaphrodites. Deep down I probably had a hidden tendency to homosexuality. For me a woman’s greatest attraction was probably her youth. I also found that the negativity of some women inspired nothing but an impulse of rape.