When she reached the roof, he took off, and Mouy called my brothers to tell them to go tell that damned guy, that bastard, that swine, that hooligan, and countless other names not to prowl around here anymore unless he was looking for someone to shave his head. And then, she took care of me. I cried and screamed. If I had known where all of it would lead, I would have gone to a hammam to ease my tension and then gone and relaxed beneath the covers. But I was too young for that and it was still eating away at me down there.
The days passed, and I continued to cry and act as if I were in a movie. I refused to eat, I refused to bathe. Neither Mouy’s beatings nor Ba’s could do anything to combat it. Mouy was going insane, at a loss for what to do with me. One day, without warning, while we were eating, she turned toward me and said in front of everyone, “The only solution for you is marriage.”
She said to my older brother, pointing her finger at him, “Are you the one who knows him the best? Or is it you?” turning toward another of my brothers.
Without waiting for a response, she added, looking between the two of them so that the one who felt the most targeted would act: “You’ll go see the kid and you’ll tell him to bring his mother here so I can talk to her. And you, I’m warning you,” she said to me, pointing her right index finger at me and her opposite eyebrow toward the sky, “don’t come crying to me the day when things go south with him.”
I learned much later that Mouy expected Hamid to take off when he heard wind of serious talk. But that’s not what happened.
In the end, his mother came. She brought sugarloaves, tea, and her two daughters, in case my mother wanted one of them for her sons.
My mother had loaned me one of her light beige outfits, simple, without a belt. And she had braided my hair. I served the tea. I had prepared msemens* and butter cakes. They sat down and they spoke.
Not long after, we were married. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my life. All the more so because I had snatched him away from the other girls.
We had a beautiful celebration. We slaughtered a sheep, the family came, the neighbors came. The family of the groom sent a cow! Big, hefty, black and white. I saw it arrive from a distance through the window of the bedroom where they had put me to get ready. It took up the entire street. And you should have seen how they decorated its forehead: they had made it the most beautiful mint crown I had ever seen. It was really something. It was so beautiful that I let out the biggest youyou of my life. It lasted such a long time that as I was still letting loose, Mouy had the time to come down from the roof where she was doing who knows what, come up behind me, take off her sandal and throw it at the back of my head yelling that a bride doesn’t yell her own youyous, that it was a jinx and that today, since she was going to be rid of me, was an important day.
At my wedding, the women danced and the guests ate well. We had the best couscous! If the plates could talk, you wouldn’t have been able to distinguish their youyous from those of the women. My mother certainly knows how to make couscous. And I do too. When a pregnant woman has a craving, it’s always my couscous they ask for. When I was born, my mother rubbed a chicken liver in my palms so that I would know how to cook. And I can make rfissate*! You’d gobble up your fingers along with it.
The other day, I was with the girls and I served them a couscous with meat and vegetables. There was squash, zucchini, turnips, carrots, eggplants, onions; all God’s vegetables were in it. As we ate, Samira said, “Jmiaa, if you cooked for weddings, you would be as famous as Choumicha.*”
And the jealous Jahar said to her, “You mean Bargache*?” implying that I’m fat.
“All the women who can remember Bargache are taking care of their grandchildren at this hour,” Samira snapped back.
We had a good laugh.
After the celebration of my wedding, we stayed in Berrechid for a little while at my mother’s house, and then Hamid suggested that we go live in Casa. There’s work over there, he said.
We left. We rented a bedroom in the home of an elderly woman we called Lhajja.*
In the beginning, Hamid went out in the morning to go to work. I don’t know what he did exactly, but the important thing is that he brought back money.
I spent the day at the house, either watching the television or listening to music—Najat Aatabou* most of the time. Hamid had given me a cassette of her music when we were still in Berrechid, and since that time, Najat had become like a sister to me. I know all her songs by heart, and I’ve never missed one of her performances on television.
At the time, I listened to her songs without much thought, but now I know what I like about her: it’s that she always sings about ordinary things, seemingly banal stories that could happen to anyone a thousand times a day. There’s always a moment in her songs when she says something that’s exactly what happened to you. As if she were with you at that moment. Or as if her brain were connected to yours when she sat down to write. She kept me good company.
And when Hamid returned at the end of the day, we would have a snack and spend the night together. It was wonderful. And since there’s nothing better than the truth, the truth is that every day, I was like a bride on her wedding night. He would come back and he would find me lying down, propped on my side on one elbow, a hand placed on my plump thighs, watching the television. Scheherazade on her honeymoon bed! As if I had spent the day posing like a whore in front of the television.
As soon as he opened the door and saw me like that, he would jump rig ht on top of me. He would forget about the joint he had planned to smoke, about his friends he would sometimes grab coffee with, and everything else. It all faded away, and the only thing he saw was a human-sized cake filled with cream, posed on his bed like a gift from God.
On Sundays we would usually go for a walk. We would go to the square with the pigeons, next to the fountain. I would put on my wedding djellaba—green, with golden embroidery on the front, the side, and the sleeves. We would walk down Avenue Hassan II and eat pepitas. We would stop to eat snails. All the women would stare at us, we were so beautiful. We laughed a lot together, I don’t remember what about. It would be like that through our entire walk. He would laugh and I would laugh. As if our laughs were speaking to each other.
When we went on walks and I held him by the arm, his chest would inflate like a peacock deploying its tail. It was like what you see in movies. The hero is beautiful, well dressed, well mannered. And the girl who’s with him is smiling, joyous. You don’t even need to hear what they’re saying to understand what’s happening. There’s just background music.
But where do movies get it from, do you know? They get it from real life. The problem is that those sons of bitches who write the stories, they don’t tell you where it leads in the end. No, they know to stop the story after the wedding day. When your stomach is still bloated and you smile so much that your teeth are about to fall out and start wriggling around with the guests. What comes after isn’t their problem. Because if they tell you what comes next, you won’t go see their shitty movie.
And then, the two worthless months of the honeymoon phase passed. And little by little, things started to change. In the moment, I didn’t realize. It began insidiously, like an illness. By the time I understood, they had already rolled me in a shroud.
Hamid started to leave the house later and later in the morning. He had taken a job with a real estate agent: he found clients to buy and sell houses and he was given commissions on the sales. Just like Chaïba’s Belaïd or Saïd. From time to time, he also sold cars. That’s what he told me. And that’s how he justified coming home sometimes with a fat stack of money, and other times bringing back nothing. The irregular income didn’t bother me. When he gave me more than I needed, I hid the extra in the closet with my things. And so he wouldn’t realize I was setting money aside, I kept asking him for money every Friday. But when he didn’t have any, I didn’t insist.
&nb
sp; Hamid would get angry very quickly. When I felt it happening, I didn’t leave him the time to pick a fight with me. I quickly found something else to do. Like go fetch the oil I had forgotten at the store. Or the Laughing Cow. Or a tin of sardines. Or whatever would make me disappear from his sight.
But sometimes, he cornered me before I could leave. When that happened, I knew I was done for.
What you need to know to understand what I’m saying is that Hamid loved his joints. And that there’s nothing worse than joints, even if everyone smokes them—from kids to the elderly—and even if they say that it grows out of the sidewalks it’s so common. I’ve seen the darkest oddities in my life but I’ve never seen a sickness like hashish.
Hashish is a sweet sickness. It enters gently into the skin, it’s cool, cheerful. It makes you feel good. You want to be in its arms, you want it to cradle you like your mother did. It has the same effect each time, it reassures you. And your friends who smoke, they’re also cool and nice. And you’re all in the arms of the same mother. You’re all brothers. And you love each other. And then one day, you don’t know why, like a cat, the mother takes one of her little ones and eats it. Just like that. Why that one? Why not his brother? God only knows. The others who are with you, they continue to puff on their joints, they don’t move. They watch it gobble you up, hovering between the soporific effect and the fear that the same thing will happen to them.
But to understand that, you have to live it. Since I wasn’t familiar with it, I let Hamid smoke as much as he wanted. The problem is that cat with her little ones. Of all the litter, she chose Hamid. He became paranoid. He suspected everything he saw or heard.
* * *
—
Hamid wore me out when he smoked. He would spend hours talking into the void. It started with something trivial and then we would inevitably dig up things from the past, like that night when we were sitting peacefully at the house. He was going out to meet his friends, and I was watching an Egyptian show.
“Where are my black pants?” he asked me, his head in the closet, his arm going back and forth between the armoire and the bed, throwing clothes around.
“Ask before you gut the entire armoire. I washed them, they’re on the roof drying,” I responded, pushing away the clothes that had ended up next to me, without taking my eyes off the television.
After a moment of silence: “Why do you watch this shitty show?” he said to me with a grimace crumpling his face, his head turned toward the screen. “Gamel Pacha spends his day greasing his hair for his whore secretary, and you, do you see yourself in Amel?” he added.
On the screen, Nawel, or whatever her name was, was flaunting herself in her boss’s office, so that he would ditch his wife and take her on a cruise down the Nile. It was long before Mexican soaps were available on our TVs.
“Her name’s not Amel,” I said to avoid answering the question.
“Okay, her name’s not Amel, but his name is Gamel Pacha, rig ht?” he answered, wriggling around to imitate the image he had of the hunk.
“What do you care?” And I added, getting up, “Hang on, I’m going up to see if your pants are dry.”
“You are not going up or down. You will sit here and you will speak to me,” he said, pointing at the bed.
And then we were off. As soon as he got me to sit down, I was done for. The sparring began. Question after question. I defended myself. Don’t think that I just let it happen. That’s not my way. But the difference between him and me is that he didn’t feel exhaustion. He never got short of breath when he argued. I wasn’t used to it yet.
I remember very clearly the sensation that I felt during those never-ending fights. When he started to grill me, it was like he inserted a worm into my stomach. And that worm was eating whatever it found there, very slowly. It grew bigger, grew bigger, grew bigger until it replaced my intestines, climbed up my throat and reached my brain. Once there, the first thing the worm did was block my ears. It ate the canal that led to the orifices, and my ears plugged up. I couldn’t hear anything anymore. It made me want to hurl. And then, it attacked my brain. I wanted to sever my head from my neck, set it on the table and leave. I wanted for all of it to be over. While this happened, Hamid continued to move his lips at me, asking question after question. Eventually, I don’t know why, he would stop talking and leave. He would stop at the point when I was emptied, when I felt hollow as a jug. As if he and the worm were one and the same. And he knew that there was nothing left to eat.
* * *
—
On top of the paranoia, the joints, his anxiety, and the money that was becoming increasingly rare, he added alcohol. When I first met him, he would drink Saturday nights with his friends. For a bit of fun. When we arrived in Casa, and since he no longer had his mother watching over him, he started to drink a little more.
He would go out and drink with his friends at the end of the day before coming home for dinner.
From time to time, he would go out again after dinner too. And then it started to happen more frequently. On the one hand, it suited me because he was starting to wear me out. But on the other, it got under my skin because I didn’t like the idea that he was tired of me. That’s what happens when you marry someone you love: sooner or later, he abandons you. And all that remains are the cold cinders from the blaze you thought could roast lambs by the thousands.
He stopped coming home at night to eat with me. The first few times, I waited for him while falling asleep in front of the television, but he would show up late, and he reeked. A stench of cigarettes and wine that turned my stomach. I hated it. Especially because he liked to climb on top of me in that state. As I was sleeping, I felt him enter and hump me, rigid like a donkey in heat. My nose detected him before my thighs. And then over time, I stopped wanting to touch him, even when he was sober.
Sometimes, at night, he wouldn’t even be able to make it to our bed. And more and more regularly, he would puke his guts out onto the floor. The next day, I would clean everything. His vomit on the floor and my soiled sheets. Even then, I didn’t say a thing. I let him do it, telling myself that it would pass, that he was still young and he would settle down like everyone else. But it became the norm, and the more time passed the more sick of it I got. I would get up in the morning, my mood like disheveled hair, and shout at Hamid, who was only half listening from within his fog. And then I would shut up so the neighbors didn’t hear us. I would never have been able to bear the thought that they knew what was going on in our home.
One day, I realized that Hamid was no longer bothering to get up for work. God only knows how he was bringing money home. He would get up in the middle of the afternoon, he would have his coffee with milk while smoking a cigarette, and he would go to the café to find his friends. That was his work. Go to the café and dream up plans that would score him loads of cash.
Sell contraband merchandise brought back from the North, gas from the South, open a dairy with his sister…Each day brought its share of ideas that would enrich him. One day, he came home with what he called the best opportunity he’d ever had in his life: one of his friends had proposed that he invest ten thousand dirhams in merchandise from China. Bundles filled with glasses, sandals, sheets. He planned to buy the merchandise and sell it off at Derb Omar.* He said he would start out that way, buy another lot of merchandise, and continue on like that until he became rich.
He borrowed the money from his mother. God only knows what she sold to help him out. The day when he came back from Berrechid with the money, he went out with his friend to celebrate their incredible future business partnership. It was a party, and what a party! He went out with ten thousand dirhams, he came back with nothing. He didn’t even realize it until he woke up the next morning. The money had flown away. He had hidden it in the inside pocket of his jacket, he said! Was he out of his mind?
He spent the day searching for the money. Outsid
e first, then in the house. He emptied the contents of our armoire onto the bed and the floor. He rifled through all my things. He even tore out the inside pocket of his jacket to make sure the bills hadn’t slid into the lining. When he realized that all trace of his money had disappeared, that’s when he turned his sights on me.
To help him, like an idiot, I asked him to retrace his steps from the night before, telling him to try to remember where he had been exactly, the places he might have forgotten. By way of response and telling me to mind my own business, he slapped me so hard he gave me a black eye. It was the first time he had raised a hand to me. And from that day on, his hand would remain high, searching for any pretext to land on my face.
When it was out of jealousy, I said nothing because I understood, but when it was because he just needed to cool off, then I would fly off the handle and I would hit him too, I’d smack him rig ht in the face.
I couldn’t tell you where that money went. In any event, the story ended with him kissing my feet and hands so that I would give him my bracelets and the gold chain he had gifted me on our wedding day. By the time I had given in and he’d sold them along with his motorcycle, it was too late for him to buy the merchandise. The container from China had left the port.
So he gave the money from my gold to his mother and he was back at square one.
That was when he lost it. He couldn’t bear being duped. The day he had planned to return the money to his mother, he gave her a magnificent scarf telling her that thanks to her, he had managed to get his business going. And that he would start to earn a decent amount of money and would be able to pay her back for all the good she had done for him.
* * *
—
In the end, he exaggerated the story so much that it was as if he’d started believing it. And the two pennies he managed to earn were no longer enough. Now he thought only of money and how to get his hands on it. But even so, don’t imagine that he tried for even a minute to sort out a real job. To get work, having a tongue that tells tall tales is not enough. No, to get work, you need a good head on your shoulders. And Hamid only had the outline.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth Page 6