‘When did she die?’
‘A few hours ago, in the Municipal Hospital. She’s been unconscious for two days.’
I hadn’t seen her for more than a year. The last time, I’d had a tape recorder with me and I’d asked her to sing me some songs in Rif dialect. She was a little embarrassed, but she smiled and began to sing. The words were about the joys of childhood, and gathering firewood, and harvest time, but her voice was sad. The worries of old age had taken a lot out of her. The fact that I was away so much meant that I missed her less. She must have been thinking, as she always did, about the distance between us. After all, I was the only clever one in the family. It was as if she were half dead and half alive. My feelings for her were awakened that morning. I had an emptiness in my soul. My health was in a pretty bad state. I only usually feel lonely on days when I’m sick.
Three in the morning. I wrestled with my hangover and forced myself to get up. I staggered across to the doorway and put a hairbrush in the crack so that it wouldn’t shut. Another time I might not even have been capable of standing up. I was half awake and half asleep – I find I like being in that state because things you see in the clear light of day are never as beautiful as things that are half-dreamt. The dawn light was breaking. I hadn’t seen dawn like this for years. The chassis of a crashed car, rusting near a tree. All that was left of the tree was a dried-out stump. The remains of a dead dog in the road, birds hovering overhead and more birds sitting on the electricity wires. I hadn’t been to Sebta since Arhimo got married in Principe, more than ten years previously. It was the custom among my brother-in-law’s tribe for the bride’s eldest brother to carry her in his arms from the camel litter to the courtyard of the house. Abdelaziz found me drinking in a local bar with a number of old Spaniards, one of whom had lived in Tangier for a long time. He remembered the Jewish women from Eastern Europe coming to Tangier in the Nazi period, bringing with them small domestic birds in cages, and he remembered grilled sardines and onions in the wine shops, and wine from the barrel, and the boxes for seats, and how, every three glasses, it was drinks on the house, and how in those days there were always customers ready to volunteer a song.
At my sister’s wedding I’d almost fallen while I was carrying her. The bride and groom broke the large round bread that had been baked for the wedding. The company scattered salt on the couple. They drank a bit of milk and ate dates. They put a big key in her hand. Women from the groom’s family grabbed the embroidered handkerchiefs that decorated the camel litter, and also the pins that held the handkerchiefs on. This was supposed to neutralize the evil eye, or so they told me. The groom and his family had the upper hand. The bride’s family were just looking on like servants. The groom made the shape of an arch with his arm at the doorway to the room, and the bride passed under his arched arm, bowing her head. I picked my way through the wedding guests to return to the bar with the middle-aged Spaniards.
‘What did she die of?’
‘A haemorrhage – a nose bleed. It didn’t stop for a fortnight.’
The sound of a small bird crashing against the front of the car. Now it would no longer be able to pluck the berry it was dreaming of. A shepherd leading a small flock of sheep, followed by a skinny dog. A woman milking a cow. Chickens and their chicks. Sickly-looking children scratching up dirt with a stick. We overtook a man riding a broken-down bicycle and pedalling with difficulty. The bicycle was old. The daily grind was beginning. Morning was breaking in all its splendour. It looked glorious. I wrestled with my drowsiness. What I needed was a good cold beer. Malika had rung from Tetuan to ask if I could let her have 100 dirhams for dental work on a tooth that was keeping her awake at nights. That was when she’d told me about my father’s death.
‘When did he die?’
‘Months ago.’
‘Why didn’t anyone tell me at the time he died?’
‘Because we knew that you never got on with him.’
‘But what are the neighbours going to think …?’
‘They know that you two always hated each other …’
They did the same thing to me when my aunt died, as if I was no longer interested in who was alive and who was dead. They didn’t tell me about anything except the weddings. It must have been my mother who had asked them to send for me. Even during the period when she’d fallen sick and was unconscious they hadn’t told me.
The corpse of a donkey at the edge of a cornfield. The trees looked as if they were racing us and we were overtaking them. My brother-in-law’s hands were steady on the steering wheel. He didn’t smoke or drink. When I’ve had a bad night I usually find that my hand shakes with the first drink of the day. I lit a cigarette. The first drag made me dizzy. With the second drag I stuck my head out of the window to retch up air. My eyes were watering and I had a belly ache. He gave me a sideways glance. He’d never have let on openly that he disapproved of me.
My brother Abdelaziz told me:
‘We made a nice grave for our father. You really ought to visit it some time.’
The graves of our brothers and sisters who had died during the years of famine had been wiped out, levelled by the wind and the rain. We’re lucky nowadays because we’re able to provide decent graves for our family when they die. This was what I told him and he was happy to hear me say it. Despite the crying of my sisters, Arhimo and Malika, and the weeping of two old women who had been my mother’s friends in Tetuan, drowsiness got the better of me and I fell asleep. I woke up when the mourners’ crying turned to wailing. The smell of rose water filled the laying-out room where they washed her body. The funeral procession started out towards the Sidi Mubarak cemetery. Death is a very final thing. Around me were twenty mourners whom I didn’t know. In the street, others joined the procession. She didn’t fit into the hole they’d made. They had to take her out again twice and one joker shouted:
‘Hey, Abdullah, have respect for the woman! Stop tormenting her and dig her the grave she deserves!’
The gravedigger dug the edge of the grave a third time. I felt like chopping off his hands and gouging out his eyes. Even in death they wouldn’t give her space in the earth. Rose water was sprinkled on the shroud. Then came the funeral prayer. Bread and figs were distributed to those present. There were no poor people there for the distribution of bread. Stuffed chicken with rice. An eagerness to eat, and a fierce argument between Arhimo and Malika about the rights or wrongs of selling our house in Tetuan. Their husbands maintained a silent neutrality. We had built the house with the help of everyone in the neighbourhood, using stones from an earth-bank near where we lived. The women and the children, the unemployed, all of them had played a part in building this house. Our mother had always told us that we should only sell it if circumstances forced us to, and none of us was particularly needy at that point. I kept my own opinion to myself, but there seemed to be no way of breaking out of the argument. Eventually they gave up arguing and started to see about tea. I was overcome by a wave of dizziness which then gave way to nausea. I’d been smoking all day and my mouth was tasting vile. I was drinking only coffee. I pretended that I had to go out to buy cigarettes. Arhimo told me that I ought to cut down on the smoking and then she said:
‘Abdelaziz will go out and buy you cigarettes if you can’t do without them till tomorrow.’
I was dying to get out of the place. They noticed how itchy I was getting. My relations didn’t say anything. My mother’s funeral and selling our house, all on the same day. This had been the longest day of my life and I had never felt so bad. I knew that the death of my mother meant the death of my family. Arhimo was insistent that I returned straight away because she said that I didn’t know the night in Sebta. She didn’t realize that the night is my friend wherever I am. For me the night has always been a kind of escape route, whether in Barbès, the Barrio Chino in Barcelona, the Carmen area of Valencia, or Bab Marrakech in Casablanca. At that moment I wished I was in some place like a cave, with not even dripping water to disturb the
silence. I don’t remember how many bars I went into. After the second or third one everything became a confused blur. How had I left the city? I woke up to find myself in bed in my flat with all my clothes on. With the passing of the years I have tried in vain to remember how I got back to Tangier. One of my shoes was at the end of the bed, full of piss, and the other was on the bedside table, with wine dripping from it. I once knew a man who had pissed on his daughter while she was asleep in bed because he mistook the bed for the toilet. I hadn’t pissed on anyone except myself. The day came when we sold the house and the money had to be apportioned according to Islamic law. My sisters began crying, silently, in the presence of the assessors, in this house of ours which we were now leaving for the last time. I asked our neighbour what was making them cry and he replied:
‘Why do you think they’re crying?! They’re crying for the memory of your parents!’
I took 1,000 dirhams from my portion on the taifor, to match my brother’s share, and I gave my sisters 1,000 dirhams each. They stopped their crying. I whispered to our neighbour:
‘I tell you, this is all just a charade, and its characters are all clowns and hypocrites.’
I left Tetuan in the knowledge that the umbilical cord had been cut and that the roots of my family tree had now rotted beyond the point of no return.
1. Two boxers who lived in Tetuan in the 1940s.
28
This wasn’t the first time that Saliya had come to Tangier from her small town. She’d come before as a visitor, but this time she’d decided to stay. Tangier, city of dreams; Tangier the naked, a boisterous city as transparent as crystal; Tangier the myth, the city that is all things to all people. Saliya didn’t realize that Tangier crushes anyone who hasn’t learned how to drink her enchanted wine. She is Circe the sorceress.1 I know people who came here to write poetry and didn’t even learn the language of the bars, and people who came to paint and didn’t even know how to mix their colours.
This time when Saliya came, it was with a determination to stake everything in the hopes of winning the jackpot. This involved gambling her bottom half against her rough top half.
She was plunged into a wild life of drink and hashish. In the same way that mushrooms proliferate but don’t grow, she had men quarrelling for her affections. Her kinds of mushrooms proved poisonous for anyone who fell for her. She loved all men but wanted none. If she ever went with a man who found it difficult to get aroused, she would pretend that she was being raped, to excite him. She came from a good home, but she soon became like a curse on her family. From an early age she’d allowed her body to be raped by the teenagers of her town – and from other towns – and by the drunks and the hashish smokers. Her hand always trembled as she reached for her glass, and she could never be bothered to knock the ash off her cigarette. She once told her friend Carolina: ‘Everyone who ever made me a promise always let me down.’
She soon gave up ideas of love and marriage, and learned how to get men to fight over her. She would write things in a notebook, in her terrible, shaky handwriting:
‘You block my way at every point. What am I to do? There is no way out for me. You scare me, like some mythical monster. I am searching for a dream and I find no inspiration in you. You want me, but I want myself with that same strength with which you claim to want me.’
My friend Paloma also split her time between hashish, heavy drinking and writing down her thoughts.
‘I really don’t trust myself. And I write like a crazy person. If you ask me, I think that happiness is like a frog wearing a hat of peacock feathers. Love frightens me. I’m an angel with two black wings. A heart without an eye. I never wanted to travel to the edge of the abyss. Love doesn’t matter to me any more; it’s become like some dead whale, high and dry on a deserted beach in the heat of summer.’
In the midst of her heavy drinking and her nights of sex, something like remorse must have awakened in Saliya. She went back to live in the city she’d come from, in order to live in cleaner air and to regain her waking dreams. But then it was back to Tangier again, with her powders and cosmetics.
For three days the only food I had was the leftovers of customers at Mr Moh’s café. The sea was rough, and the harbour area deserted, with no warships in, and no cargo ships either. This was in 1955. I was supposed to be getting the last remnants of a ship’s crew back to their ship. They were drunk. There was an easterly wind blowing up a gale. I passed in front of the Bar María at about supper time. Abdeslam called me over. He offered me a glass of wine. I asked him for a loan of 5 pesetas to get something to eat. I understood from his protests that all he had was the price of a drink for himself and a drink or two for me. I thought: what do I do now? I ate the nuts that came with my drink. Then I also ate the nuts that came with his drink, and then the nuts of the man sitting next to him. He started ordering one drink after another, and he got so drunk that he was almost falling over. Babbling drunk. Before he left, I asked him for 1,000 pesetas and he gave it to me without batting an eyelid. I regretted not having asked him for more, because he’d surely have given it.
Saliya went to visit her teacher at his house because she wanted him to check through what she called one of her ‘poetic texts’. They drank and smoked hashish together. Then, according to her version of events, when she refused to sleep with him, he tore her clothes and bit her on the neck and shoulder, leaving her with bitemarks. Saliya reckoned that on that particular night he was more drunk than she was, and she was more stoned than him. As it happened, he was going through an unsuccessful love affair with another girl student, whom he’d planned to marry, and Saliya had also been having a hard time because a boyfriend of hers had gone and married someone else.
Saliya came to Tangier at a time when even the best-looking prostitutes couldn’t get work. If they were lucky they ended up marrying one of the unemployed. She found jobs as a cleaner in one of the hotels or in kitchens. All she had left was the glory of her defeated memories, a sad craziness, a frustration that came out in her drunkenness and the idle chatter of the bars.
Saliya would spend her nights in all kinds of places – in some luxury hotel somewhere or in a cheap dive – depending on her luck, or how drunk she was, or how well-off her client was. She didn’t care who she went with. The night and her drunkenness hid the state she was in. She went from one house to another, until by the end she wasn’t even charging for sex, but was just doing it to avoid confronting her craziness and restlessness. She’d be fucked by a different man every night, sometimes rich and sometimes poor, and sometimes by more than one, until morning came.
The daytime no longer meant anything for Saliya. Her nights had no day. Daytime made her ugly, while the night made her beautiful. The only thing that kept her going was the idea that one day, somehow, she might find someone to love. But love in Tangier is not the stuff of Platonic dreams. And in fact she ended up losing herself here and became just like all the others.
It was a period of poetry and a period of dreams in Tangier, but where were the poets and where were the dreamers? The truth was that defeat was walking the streets, in extremities of wretchedness and nakedness, walking wherever it wanted.
How did I meet Saliya?
I was alone in the lobby of the Hotel Villa de France when she came in. The waiter was talking to me about football and what he thought about the national squad and some of the local teams. When there were only one or two people in the lobby, he began cursing his fellow countrymen. Saliya ordered a beer and then lit a cigarette with a trembling hand. She opened a notebook, read a few lines and then placed it on the table. The waiter carried on with his conversation. She wrote and she drank. She lit one cigarette after another. She smoked them inhaling deeply. Only a little of the smoke came out from her mouth again, pale in colour, like a lizard in summer. She didn’t seem to be one of ‘them’. It was brave of her to drink beer if she wasn’t a prostitute. She must have been a pretty liberated woman. I ordered a beer for her. She glanced at me a
nd the waiter. She thanked me with a nod and a smile, and as we smoked and drank together I asked if it would be alright for me to sit with her. She agreed with a smile, lowering her head. The notebook was open. Her pen lay across the page, across what was written there. She didn’t close the book when I sat next to her. I thought this was brave too. We asked each other’s names. She said that she’d seen me with her teacher in her town the previous summer. He and I had been drinking in the kasbah and she’d been eating sardines with her friend Carolina. I took a furtive glance at the writing in her notebook.
‘Who shall I go with today? I can’t decide whether to go back or stay. There might be drinks for me tonight, but I won’t go looking for them, and I won’t be upset if there aren’t any. Drink has a certain dignity.’
In my flat I had a strange sensation that her two nipples were peering at me. She emptied her glass each time I filled it. Then she wrote more thoughts in her notebook. Most of the time when she wrote she put the subject in the accusative and the object in the nominative. She wasn’t too hot on grammar. I didn’t have many books by the great poets, but I did have the ones who’d been killed by their love of poetry. She wasn’t too keen on any of them. Her skin was white, but it was thick and taut and peppered with black spots. She had smiling eyes when she was relaxed, and long black eyelashes. These were probably the best thing about her. She had thin lips and her hair was curly. It smelt rather like a pile of autumn leaves that has been wetted for the first time by the rains. Sometimes when she hadn’t bathed for a few days she smelt more like a goat. There was always a smell of drink and tobacco on her breath. We went to bed together. She kept her face to the wall. I woke up to find that she wasn’t in bed, and when I went looking for her I found her asleep on the couch in the sitting room, cuddling a small pillow. I thought I should buy her a toy monkey or something. She was half asleep and half awake. She was the kind who chain-smoked. She’d get through one pack a night. In the morning I found the following written in her notebook:
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