Usually, when there’s a match, I like to be in the street. I plop myself down on the stairs by the intersection. The men in the cafés watch soccer, and I watch them. To each his own spectacle.
But right now, I don’t feel like it. And I also don’t feel like staying in my bedroom with Halima and her pathetic expression, like she’s always saying look at how miserable and how serious I am. Fuck off!
I’m going to hang out with Hamid. I know he’ll be alone. The match doesn’t air on Al Aoula or on 2M. It’s too expensive, apparently. And I know his friends, faced with the choice between the match and Hamid, won’t give it much thought. The jokes he tells, as good as they are, don’t provide the same thrill as the World Cup final. Some friendship!
Before heading out, I had a few drinks. That moron Hamid only has tea.
From a distance, I see him lying in his wooden shed at the entrance of the garage. The shower curtain that serves as his door hangs by a nail.
Hamid is lying beneath his violet and gray covers, bingeing on TV. A boiling teapot is on the metal tray in front of him.
“You’re not going to fix that table before you burn yourself?” I say to him by way of hello.
The tray is balanced on a small round table with three legs, one of which is held together with wire.
“Salaam, will you have some tea?” he answers, pointing to a glass on the shelf next to the screen.
There are several glasses and no two are the same. I take one at random and turn around to grab one of the chairs at the entrance of the shed, the ones his friends sit on when they loaf around in here.
“So, what’s new with you?” he asks me, sitting up.
“You know. Nothing special,” I answer, lighting a cigarette.
* * *
—
I don’t offer him a cigarette, but I put the pack on the table. He doesn’t really like cigarettes. He prefers to puff from time to time on the joints of one of his friends, the blond with the blue eyes. He doesn’t like when I smoke inside, but I act like I’ve forgotten. Because I think it’s ridiculous for him to put on airs as if we were sitting in a palace. His shack is open to the winds, he has a shower curtain instead of a door, and I can’t smoke?
The images flick by on the television. The tea has a lot of honey in it, which I like. We don’t speak. It’s often this way with him and that’s how I like it. Sometimes we laugh and have fun, and other times, we have nothing to say and keep quiet.
“You have good timing,” he says to me without taking his eyes off the screen, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something for a while now.”
“Here I am.”
In the street, a red car passes. It’s silent, like everything around here.
“The other day, a woman who lives here, in the building right on the corner—you won’t know who she is even if I describe her—came to speak to me. She’s small and fat and has curly hair. She’s the owner of the Honda,” he says to me, indicating the blue car parked opposite us.
“Hmmm…”
“I know her. We talk from time to time, the two of us. You know how I am, I like to get to know people. She’s a good lady. Her husband works in fashion. He was on the TV the other day. Anyway, I didn’t really understand what she wants but she has a niece who works for a paper, or for the TV in the Netherlands, and she wanted to know if I knew one of the girls who hangs around the market because she wants to meet one of you.”
“For what?” I ask, turning toward him.
He brings the tea to his mouth and looks straight ahead of him.
“I don’t know. I think it’s for an interview or something like that. I don’t know exactly. But she told me that her niece was willing to pay just for talking.”
“Is it for something in the Netherlands or here?” I ask him.
“I don’t know.”
“So?”
“So what?” he answers.
“So what did you say?”
“I said that I would see, what do you think I said?” he responds, throwing his covers to his feet in a gesture that’s both smooth and taut at the same time—like the tongue of a chameleon—and getting up to go to the bathroom.
Why would that woman want to meet me? If it’s for Moroccan TV, I could guess which show she worked for. I know every show that runs on 2M and on Al Aoula. I never miss a program, not a single one slips through my fingers. If there’s one thing I know about, it’s shows. I’m an expert on all of them.
“Since I forgot to talk to you about it, she asked me again yesterday or the day before,” he yelled from the bathroom.
I can tell you who acted in what and when and the name of the first stepmother of the hero in a series. But when it comes to the Netherlands, I have no way of knowing what she wants.
Hamid comes back. He’s standing at the door with half of the beige shower curtain on his head. He dries his hands on his jeans. I ask him, “What do you think?”
“I have no idea, but maybe there’s a bit of money to be made, no?”
“Is it for a paper or for the television?”
It gives me a headache not knowing what it is she wants.
“I told you that I don’t know anything, but how about this, I’ll ask her and I’ll tell you what it’s all about, okay?” he responds, shoving his hands back in his pockets.
WEDNESDAY THE 14TH
Since that conversation with Hamid the other day, nothing special has happened. The day before yesterday, I tried to speak to him to get an update, but he didn’t respond, that ass. And again yesterday, I passed in front of the garage. He was with people and he acted like he didn’t see me when I waved to him from the other side of the road.
In the meantime I’ve been thinking of a way to do that dick a favor and do his shitty interview without anyone recognizing me.
I told myself that if this girl works for television, I’ll ask them to use a square that blurs my face. So that people don’t recognize me. Like in Moukhtafoune.*
But if it’s a newspaper or a book, I’m not interested. I don’t like reading. You read a book, you bust your ass trying to decipher it, you have to use your imagination, you can’t hear the characters’ voices, you don’t know if they’re good-looking or not. To tell you the truth, I’ve never read one, but I know that it’s a chore.
You see, I racked my brain with all this thinking, and he disappears just like that.
I didn’t try to call to him again. He can go fuck himself! And the Dutchwoman too, for that matter. If they want me, they can come and get me.
Fortunately, I didn’t talk to anyone about it. Imagine if I had said to the girls that I was going to do an interview and all that, and then it turned out that Hamid had just taken one too many drags on his playboy friend’s joint?
I almost told Halima, who’s still squatting with me. And speaking of, I found out how she ended up here. I told you it was just a matter of time.
The other day, I returned to the house with my daughter. It was a Monday night and we were coming back from the baths. I remember it clearly. Halima hadn’t heard me in the hallway.
Well, that doesn’t surprise me with all the noise around here. The neighbors, the water, the dog in the building opposite who never stops growling. With all that racket, you can’t even hear your own thoughts.
Not to mention the wife of the caretaker of the building opposite that opens onto Avenue Hassan II. She missed her true calling. She should have been a muezzin, her voice is so loud. They fight so much, she and her husband, that in the neighborhood, we follow their drama the same way we followed Guadalupe when that soap had just aired.
She can’t stand for her stepsister to come visit anymore. He’s looking for his blue pants and finds them still hanging out to dry. She goes to her mother’s, he goes looking for her. It never ends.
That night, Rabia was also
speaking on the telephone with her sister who’s married and lives in Italy, and every time, she yells because she can’t hear clearly. She says the signal is bad.
If you want my opinion, I don’t think the signal has anything to do with it, even if it is shitty. Rabia is deaf and she’s the only one who doesn’t realize it, that’s the truth.
Anyway, back to the story. When Samia and I walked through the door, Halima jumped and I thought I saw her hide something under the cushion beneath her. I’m not in the habit of keeping quiet when something isn’t rig ht. Also, she’s in my home, so I have a right to know what’s going on, don’t I?
“What did you hide back there?” I asked her, eyeing the cushion.
My immediate thought was that she had taken something from my cabinet.
“Nothing. I’m watching television.”
Men Dar Ldar* was on the screen. That big hit series about servants, hypocrisy, and poverty. I don’t like it. I like the Mexican soaps or the Turkish ones or even the Brazilian ones. I watch the Moroccan series, like everyone, but they aren’t my favorite.
Halima adores them. And since I know that she follows all the episodes of the lives of those poor people with great interest, I doubted myself and admitted that maybe my eyes had deceived me. “Maybe she really was just watching TV?” I thought. But the suspicion persisted and since her expression was a little too innocent, I pushed her butt with my hands and I searched beneath the cushion below her.
There, I found a photo of her with two boys. They were seated in a living room with violet tapestries and a big mirror behind them and they were laughing. The two boys were wearing the same outfit. Black pants and a red checkered shirt. They looked about the same age, that of my daughter. When I saw the photo, I looked up at her.
“These are your sons?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “Twins.”
And her chest rose noisily, in a big puff of air.
“And that’s your home?” I added.
I had noticed that she liked the color violet but I didn’t expect it to be spread over her entire living room. She doesn’t have very good taste, anyway. It shows just by the colors of her djellabas. Sea green and mauve. Does she call those colors? She never wears patterns. And you can see her hair! It’s in such a state! She never takes care of it. Not even at the baths. She doesn’t use ghassoul* or henna, nothing.
“Yes,” she sighed again.
And suddenly, she started to cry, cry, cry. Like an overflowing river. I had never seen such a thing. Even when my father died, no one cried like that. It’s not like me to be at a loss for words, but this was too much. I sat down and remained at her side to see if it would end on its own or not.
“Go fetch her some water instead of staring at her like that,” I said to my daughter.
She took off running for the kitchenette, the poor thing. From where I was, I saw her take the five-liter canister and pour water into a glass. Since the canister was heavy for her, her arms were shaking. Even so, she didn’t spill a single drop on the floor.
“I called home today, and I reached my son,” said Halima, sobbing. “I hardly had the time to be happy to hear from him when he recognized my voice and hung up.”
“He won’t talk to you anymore?” I asked.
She shook her head left to right to say no. Her hair spilled out of her headscarf and her nose was red and swollen. She squeezed her hands together and her fingers were so tense that there was no blood flowing in them anymore. They were somewhere between white and blue.
“It’s been more than two years since I’ve spoken to them. Their father forbids it. And he,” indicating the one on the left, “doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
And she breathed a “thank you,” taking the glass of water that my daughter handed to her before sitting on the mattress beneath the window.
From where she was, Samia could see the TV screen; a semsara* had just brought a new servant to the home of a worthless bourgeois woman. Halima was still crying. I said nothing. And just as she had started to cry, in an unending surge, that’s how she started to talk.
“Before, I had a husband, kids, a job, a normal life. I was working for a company and I liked my job. I spent a lot of time there. During my lunch break, I would log onto the Internet to chat with my friends. One day, I received a message from someone I didn’t know. A man. He told me that he’d noticed me leaving work and had inquired about me. He learned that I managed the customer orders and he called the operator to get my email. He drowned me in compliments, day after day. At first, I didn’t respond, but he was so persistent that I started to write him back.
“It lasted the entire summer, and by the end, my heart would race when I noticed one of his emails. From time to time, I said to myself that I shouldn’t behave like this, that I was married. I even decided to stop speaking to him, but he sent me photos of flowers and videos of Amr Diab,* because he knew that I liked those things. So I responded to him and it started back up again.
“If I had known…The more time passed the less I could be without him. He told me his name was Taoufik. When we wrote, he asked me to describe what I was doing, what I was wearing, how I was dressed…We hadn’t met in person yet.
“One day, he gave me a time for us to see each other on the Internet. It was on a Saturday, when my husband was taking the kids out to play soccer. That day, I logged on and we started to talk. I turned on my camera. He told me his had an issue, that it wasn’t working that day. He told me I was magnificent and one thing led to another, we became intimate.”
* * *
—
All I could see of Halima’s face were tears, Kleenex, and the end of her running nose. As she spoke, I pushed tissues in her direction. Her story was interesting but not interesting enough for me to watch her drip snot onto my cushions without doing anything about it. And so that I could concentrate, I asked Samia—who had abandoned the TV a while ago and was now listening with her mouth agape—to go buy some bread at the store.
* * *
—
“At one point, and I don’t know how it happened, I did things that were a bit risqué. I won’t give you the details. It happened two weeks in a row. I waited for Saturday impatiently. I hadn’t seen him yet. When I asked him to set up his camera, he told me that his looks were nothing compared to mine. He knew how to speak in such a way that he could have made you believe he was speaking to you from paradise, God forgive me.”
* * *
—
Halima had stopped crying. Because I know what men are capable of, I understood completely what she was saying.
* * *
—
“The following Monday, I arrived at work and I walked past my boss to say hello. He was in his office and he seemed to be looking at something funny on his screen. When I turned on my computer, I immediately opened my mailbox to read Taoufik’s messages. My stomach dropped. It was as if someone had plunged their hand inside of me and ripped my heart out. In several emails were screenshots of me posing for him, messages I had written him, everything…the inside of my body was a giant seesaw. And I didn’t know how to stop the motion.
“I didn’t dare open my email again until between noon and two o’clock, when the office was empty. Taoufik had sent those messages to everyone: me, my colleagues, my boss, who had been laughing that morning, my husband…everyone.
“I got up, I took my bag and I left. I saw nothing, I heard nothing. But my blood had frozen, and it was burning my skin from the inside. I wandered through the city the entire day, clutching my bag under my arm. If I hadn’t feared God, I would have killed myself that day.
“When night fell, I went home. My husband was already there. Seated on a chair in front of the door. The children were seated behind him in the living room. The blood had left their faces, and their lifeless arms were hanging at their sides. I don’t have the wo
rds to describe that night. Until dawn, the children watched, crying. Every time one of them wanted to protect me, their father sent them flying against the living room wall.
“I was so ashamed that I said nothing as he hit me. Never before that day had I realized that what I was doing from behind the screen was real.
“I’ll tell you something: my reflexes made me hide my face, but in reality I was relieved that he hit me. I wanted it to last until I expiated my sins and emerged a virgin again from that affair. Or until I died.”
* * *
—
Halima was no longer looking at me. She was no longer there. She recounted the rest in a state of calm.
* * *
—
“After that night, my husband asked for a divorce. The judgment was pronounced very quickly. I didn’t try to defend myself. I didn’t hire a lawyer. They condemned me to two years in prison for pornography. The last time I saw my husband was the day he brought me the papers from the bank and the notary for something concerning our apartment. I signed them without reading them.
“Since the sentencing, I have been so ashamed that I haven’t seen anyone again except one colleague, Nisrine, with whom I was friends at the office. She came to see me once in prison. She told me something that I would have preferred never to know.”
* * *
—
Halima slowly shook her head from right to left, her gaze in the void, smiling. She reminded me of a nutjob I’d seen in a film on 2M who was standing in front of a precipice. Before throwing herself off, she’d had exactly the same smile as Halima in that moment.
* * *
—
“She told me that after I left, all anyone could talk about were those photos and my trial. She came thinking that what she would tell me would give me some relief. During the trial, people started gossiping and one day at the office, Wafaa—a secretary I didn’t get along with—bragged that she had succeeded in taking me down. Nisrine didn’t know all the details, but Taoufik was a distant cousin of Wafaa’s.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth Page 4