Isaque showed me that he was recording our chat with the walkman in his hand.
"Are you sure you didn't have a son?"
"Of course not, I'm sure. A daughter. Why are you asking this so many times? A daughter, maybe you are confusing me with the other Fátima, there was another Fátima that worked for you, three years before you left. Why did you leave? How is everything there? How is it with the Jews? We did you leave, what was so bad about Tétouan that your parents had to leave? Do you know why? There aren't any more Jews in Tétouan, mafish, walu, some old ones, before there were many, good people, they all paid well and they didn't hit us like the Arabs that always hit their Fátimas, sensible people. Your father was a very good man, very very good, so that you know.”
"Yes, too good," murmured Fortu.
"Here, we are leaving you an envelope with a few thousand dirhams."
And we left that suffocating room.
"You don't think we should have brought a notary to take a signed declaration?" I asked. “That way we would have a legal document. Maybe she had a son that died, and she doesn't want to admit it. And then she had a daughter.”
Fatima's mother, who apparently had heard what we said, approached us.
"She doesn't remember some things, and has gone a little bit crazy. She had a son who died when he was one year old, less than a year. She never talks about him. I remember when he was little. Her daughter was born later. The boy died. She cried a lot over him. She had a son, and now I have my daughter," she cooed. "Her daughter comes to see us in Ramadan, sometimes she stays a few days."
"And what was the son named?"
"Yusuf, he was named Yusuf."
"And he died?"
"He's gone. She has a daughter, very pretty, very intelligent. She's a doctor.”
We went back to the teahouse. Isaque and Fortu wanted to sit and watch the valley from there, like they did when they were little.
“What do we do?” asked Isaque.
"I think it is clear. We should get a signed statement from a notary with those two, pay the notary, and that's it. It looks like our brother died when he was young.”
"Yes, that's it. That solves all of our problems. Maybe it is very simple, just that simple, he died and that's it. Some little boys die before they reach the age of one, or maybe she didn't know what to do with him and gave him up for adoption to another family, or maybe he was kidnapped, they kidnap kids here you know. Do you remember how afraid we used to be of getting kidnapped?”
“That could be, but if that's the case we wouldn't be able to know. We could only find him through his mother. If he lives with another family or was kidnapped or lives on the moon, we can't find him. According to the will we have to do everything possible to find him, whether we find him or not. That's what the lawyer said.”
"I'm not arguing with you, but something seems strange. We should find Zohra, his sister. Talk to her.”
"It could be really interesting to talk to her, but I think the best thing to do is go back to Jerusalem with the cassette and the declaration, get the money, and then look for her in Paris."
"I think we should go back to the house and ask for her daughter's address. I'll go in the taxi. Fortu, come with me, and you all can wait for us here, and then we'll decide.”
They went back to the house, and the mother told them Fatima was asleep.
"And do you know where her daughter lives?
"In Paris, she lives in Paris."
"Do you have her address?" Any letters from her? "Here. I have a letter from a while ago. We speak usually talk on the telephone. Here, the envelope, a photo. So pretty. Zohra is really beautiful.”
The address was almost totally erased from the envelope, all you could make out was the VI arrondissement, maybe. The number of the street was 77, but we couldn't read the name of the street.
"Okay." said Silvia to Fortu. "With this name, Zohra Elbaz, we could find her in the Minitel. I don't think there are that many in Paris."
✺
"Where did you go, Papá?"
"Where the waves of the sea took me."
"And why didn't you get to know me, Papá?"
"The tower of Babel divided us by language and by people."
"And when can we live again in the same world?"
"When we say ‘my planet’ and not ‘my people’. Or ‘my country.’"
"And when will that happen?"
“When we witness its destruction.”
“And where are you now?”
“In a place without wind.”
“Snow?”
“On top of me perhaps, below me, surely.”
“And when will you come back?”
"I have already returned. I don't want to come back."
"And when will my turn be over, Papa?”
"When the idea of returning is gone. We are always going and coming back.”
PARIS
Zohra just barely made the last train after her shift. She was very excited after having received the documents regarding treatments she had received as a child.
The noise filling her head in those moments made her want to feel Marcel's penis inside her.
Her hips burned and danced almost unconsciously. She was afraid that someone on the Créteil metro line would sense her excitement, so she didn't look at any of the passengers traveling on that late night journey. Instead she looked at all of the blue seats. "Blue should calm me down, it has always calmed me."
She hoped that Marcel would be awake, but she had no idea how to tell him what she now knew. She had always known that something strange was going on. But how can you know if it is all in your head? That's like knowing how, or what other people are thinking. Can you read the mind of another? We don't even know the thoughts of those closest to us. The conductor announced that they were at the final station.
It was five minutes from the final station to the apartment she rented with Marcel. And Zohra was always afraid that in those five minutes someone would rape her. She told her boyfriend about these fears, but he never gave it much thought. "Never in a million years will a man ever understand rape, or fear of rape," she thought. And it isn't worth it to insist and to explain why it scares us so much, and the humiliation of it." Zohra had been raped once, when she was seventeen, one day after her boyfriend had left her. Someone had offered to give her a ride at an autostop, then after a few drinks together he took her to a warehouse and made her have sex with him. She hated him. Afterwards he cried and apologized for what he had done. She apologized and took her home. Her mother had screamed at her, her step-father called her a whore, and even she felt dirty and guilty for what that idiot had done to her. She thinks about him often, when making love. But now she could put those thoughts aside. This time she only wanted Marcel.
She got home quickly, as if it weren't just her legs carrying her, but as if her vagina had grown legs to speed up her pace. She felt Marcel inside her long before he actually penetrated her. When she arrived he was sleeping. She went to take a shower. A hot shower always makes sex better. Marcel preferred to shower after making love.
She left the shower naked and got into bed, pushing up against him. He slept naked, but his cool body didn't wake up. "I need you now," she thought, "I need you now more than ever. I can't help it," She touched his penis and made it as hard and strong as she could. He turned his back on her and snored a little. She turned him back onto his back and got on top of him, pushing him inside her. Her hips slid to the right and to the left, pushed in and out, and Marcel was still sleeping. She stopped trying to wake him up. That's how it went on for almost half an hour until she orgasmed. She felt it throughout her whole body, in her skin, and in the organs. She slid off of him. He hadn't ejaculated. She thought, that was the best sex I have ever had. We should do that again. Fuck while sleeping. She lay down at his side, and he turned his back to her. She fell asleep.
In the morning they woke up together and mad
e love again.
"Do you remember last night?" she asked.
"I had a wonderful dream."
He pulled her into his arms again and felt her love. As if they had just met yesterday. He might leave me today, she thought. Who knows. After I tell him what I know.
"Today I'm free all day, I'll go get some croissants and we'll have some coffee together. I have something important to tell you."
"Yes, I see," said Marcel, winking.
"I'll put on some music."
He put on a Brassens CD and left the house while the singer crooned that there is no happy love.
When he got back, Zohra was half-asleep in bed. He prepared an americano and brought the coffee and croissants to bed.
"I want you again, before the coffee."
"I don't think I have the strength. Maybe later."
"Come here, come here, put the coffee on the table."
"It will get cold."
"So?"
They fell into each other's arms again. But Marcel wasn't focused. She smiled and he brought the coffee.
"What did you have to tell me?" he asked matter-of-factly.
"Wait - let's go to the living room table. Could you bring me some marmalade? The cherry marmalade in the fridge is really good.”
He brought the marmalade while she put on a white silk blouse. They sat down at the table.
"Yes. I could keep what I discovered a secret, but I'm a Sagittarius, and I think we should tell each other everything. You need to know the truth.”
"Yes, I've realized that by now." he said with a cynical smile. She had the habit of saying anything and everything, without much tact. It was what he liked the most about her. It was different from all the manipulative women he had known.
"Well, what I have found out is...this. I wanted to know why they removed my uterus, why I can't have kids, and the director of the hospital where I am doing my specialization sent a letter to the Tangier clinic where Dr. Flemon works. He asked for all my medical records and they came yesterday. He showed them to me, and..."
"You had uterine cancer when you were a girl."
"No, worse. Or, better. It depends on how you look at things. I was born a man.”
"What?"
'It isn't just about the uterus anymore. And I thought I was taking hormones because I don't have ovaries, but that wasn't why. They have given me hormones since I was very young, to turn me into a woman. What happened is that when they circumcised me, a Jewish rabbi did it, some Rabbi Cohen. This happens, sometimes Muslims ask a Jewish rabbi to do the circumcision, at the age of one or before. He didn't do a good job, and they couldn't save my penis, and the doctors decided it would be best to turn me into a boy. That's what is says in my case file. Incredible, right?
My mother never told me about this, you know. When I was twenty they gave me silicone breasts, because mine were too small, and no doctor has noticed, it is incredible. But now things are different.”
"You never felt anything odd?"
"Odd." Zohra looked at her life from a very different perspective now. Everything from her past meant something different now. “When other children talked about periods and I didn't, it seemed odd, so I invented periods, every 28 days I bought tampons and showed them to my friends, I even had menstrual dizziness, headaches, I had all the symptoms. A doctor told me I wouldn't get a period. Enjoy it, he told me." Zohra started humming Brassens' "La Tempête".
“Yes, some things were strange," continued Zohra. “I liked playing soccer, but other girls did too, I wasn't the only one. At the Jewish high school in Tangier. I don't know why my mother sent me to a Jewish school, she worked in the homes of Jews and it was the best school in Tangier, but you know what, I've been attracted to women in the past. I made love to a few women, but I never felt like a lesbian. I could be with women, and I feel like my way of seeing men is different from other women. I couldn't give them children.”
"You aren't the only one," said Marcel, trying to digest Zohra's news.
"That's not what the difference is, the difference is that I want to be a man with the man that I am with. Not only that he conquer me, that he penetrate me. And yet it is like my vagina can penetrate the penis of the man that I am with.”
"That seems pretty complicated to me." Some sunlight started to enter through the window, heating the room.
"Well that's how it is. Maybe I need help. Maybe I can go back to being a man, but after all those hormones I don't think it would be possible.”
"And tell me something, does it seem bad, in professional terms, to change the sex of a one-year old boy, because of a circumcision gone wrong?”
“Professionally? They still do things like that. You have to consider the suffering of a man without a penis, at an early age. That's what they do, they change the sex, thinking that the person will suffer less. Today they can put in a prosthesis to substitute for a penis, which didn't exist back then, and it inflates, like a machine, but it doesn't make you a man. I can understand this operation from the point of view of a gynecologist, but from the psychological point of view...I don't know how good an idea it is. Well, it is over and done now. The situation is what it is, I am who I am.”
"Fine, fine. That was really important after all. I didn't expect that, I didn't expect you would tell me something like that. I thought that you were going to say that you had decided to marry me, and that I was going to have to explain again that I don't want to get married, but actually I kind of want to now. So that you don't escape. I don't really know what this has to do with what you just told me, but maybe...it is just what we do now.”
"It would give your parents a heart attack, if you married a Moor!" she said, imitating his mother's way of speaking.
"That isn't important to me, anyway, you could still discover that your mother is a Jew that converted to Islam to marry a Muslim general who died in the Yom Kippur War in Ramat Hagolan. Or something like that.”
"Marcel, this isn't a joke. I can't talk about marriage for at least a year, this is too big for me. This changes my whole past, it changes me, my life. I see everything differently now. Those papers from Tangier changed everything.”
Second part
GOING HOME
"I'm going."
"But you're not saying goodbye."
"I'm staying."
"And saying goodbye"
"One can never leave anywhere one has been."
"You say goodbye and you don't go, or you go without really going."
"I have already returned."
"Yes, you have returned but you never left."
FORTU
I had a lot of excuses to be the first to leave Tétouan. I should go home, my daughter isn't well, I have patients waiting for me, I can't take more vacation days. I have to go back, the Spaniards don't understand the seven days of Abel, they expect you to come back in three days, or before, the day after the burial. They'll start to think that I have some psychological issue. They won't need me anymore. We've already seen Yosef's mother...and all the excuses, separate and combined...to be able to go back to Madrid.
But the moment I left that place - and I say that place as if it were something dirty, something that belongs to another life, a mistaken life, a fearful life, a forgotten life that it is better not to remember, I say "that place", as if saying "that place" means it isn't present, as if the two worlds cannot coexist. As soon as I arrived in Ceuta from Tétouan I had a lot of time to myself. I decided to stay one more day in Ceuta, to stay the night. And to walk around the main street without doing anything, eat tapas, some more tapas, have another beer, see the shops with such familiar names, Bentata, Hachuel, Benarroch, an infinite array of stores with Jewish names, and the whole city full of Arabs.
Women from the small towns come here and bring back laden with merchandise to sell from Tétouan, Tangier, Chaouen, or Larache. They take the same route every day. Sometimes on donkeys, and if they have money they tak
e the taxis in the plazas, the ones that take seven people instead of five, squeezed in. Everything is tax-free, discmans, watches, musical equipment, Nike and New Balance shoes, and more than half of the population are Moroccan Muslims. Many Jews live here and do good business, one of them opened up a store right at the border, a sort of duty-free shop, selling everything even cheaper, everything you could want to buy: Even matzoh from Israel, because Muslims say that that's the real matzoh.
But I'm hoping to capture something here, something that I lost many years ago. I remember family trips to Ceuta, to buy things we didn't have in Franco's time, I remember how my father met an ex-general who he had done business with in the past and they spent the day drinking, they got half-drunk, he almost couldn't drive, he vomited the whole trip but seemed very happy to have met this man. I traveled to Gibraltar from here, to buy watches and to see what Papá was doing there, buying fabric and selling them in Morocco, or buying anything that could bring in money. Seated in the bar I spot someone I know.
“Jose!” I yell.
“Fortu!” We hug.
“You? Do you live here?”
“More or less. I really live in Barcelona, but my father moved his business here, so I'm visiting. I'll probably work here for a few months, he wants to move his whole business over onto computers, I'm buying them and setting up the accounting system.”
"Well, I'm traveling from Tétouan, I was here for a few days, and now I'm heading back to Madrid," I said, responding to the question that he was about to ask, or was thinking.
“Everyone comes back, where they want to or not, in the end they all come back. There is always a reason. I knew someone whose grandfather had left Tétouan for Oran fifty years ago, and he went back to see his grave. A Benzimra, like you, his last name was Benzimra...Waiter, please, some more tapas and two beers.
Chanquetes, anchovies, potatoes, and other vegetarian things. No calamari, right?
You keep kosher?”
Gates to Tangier Page 7