Two more years passed, we went to our parents’ homes from time to time for parties and we acted as though everything was normal. Mouy, who sticks her nose in everything, especially when it has nothing to do with her, started questioning me one day about my green face, my greasy hair, my body she saw when we went to the hammam, which was starting to look more and more like harira.* She couldn’t understand why my husband was making money and I was letting myself go. I didn’t tell her anything, but still she ended her tirade with, “You should have listened to me…”
One day, Hamid got his next bright idea: he would secretly emigrate to Spain. It had been a long time since I’d stopped listening to him. I didn’t even pretend to be interested, so little did I give a shit. He would speak about Spain more and more. Spain this, Spain that. And finally, he got serious. He suddenly stopped smoking joints. And he put all his energy into preparing his departure and gathering money for the smugglers. He would cross via Tangier, in a boat like the ones you see on the news. Full of black people and the displaced.
I’m sure he came up with terrible schemes to get that money. God only knows what he did. And it’s none of my concern. I didn’t realize that it was really happening until he called me one day from Spain to tell me that it had worked.
I don’t wish for anyone to feel what I felt that day. It was as if you had kept the best bite of a tagine for the very end and someone came and grabbed it out of your fingers right at the moment when it was entering your mouth. You remain there, mouth open, fingers full of emptiness and a hollow taste in the back of your throat.
When he left, Mouy wanted for me to return and live with her but I didn’t have the strength to see her and hear about it every day. So to have some peace and quiet, I told her that I had to stay in Casa to earn a bit of money and help Hamid, who had given away all his money to set himself up in Spain. She sighed even harder than usual and changed the subject.
* * *
—
One morning, when she called me to ask for the hundredth time if I would come to live with her, she told me before hanging up, “Be careful, my girl. Last night, I had a dream.”
At the time, I never listened when she started telling her stories. “I dreamt of a white bird sitting on a bridge. It was giving a speech in front of an angry crowd.”
“And?” I replied, sarcastic.
“I didn’t like the head of that bird.”
“Were you bothered because the bird was asking you for Samia’s hand?” I added, laughing out loud.
“That’s right, laugh and don’t pay any mind to what I’m saying. Until something happens to you.”
And she hung up.
Since that day, Mouy has scared me. I always suspected that she had premonitions but that was the proof. A few hours later, Hamid called me from Spain to talk to me about marrying someone else. When I saw the faqih* in town to ask him to decipher Mouy’s dream for me, he understood immediately. The white bird was Hamid. The speech was the announcement of the marriage. And the angry crowd was me. He didn’t say things in such a straightforward way because faqihs always speak in code, but when I think about it, it’s clear that that was it.
Hamid wanted for me to grant him the divorce so that he could marry over there and obtain his papers. As soon as I heard that, I told him to go to hell. I swore on my daughter’s life and my mother’s that I would never grant him the papers, not even if the earth split from the sky. After everything else, divorce was the last thing I needed.
Then I spoke to the girls about it, the friends I’d made since I started going out. That’s when I met Samira, by the way. Even if we bicker from time to time, she and I get along well. She doesn’t speak if she has nothing to say. She only acts like an idiot with that asshole cop.
The girls all told me to grant him the divorce so that my daughter might have a chance. Maybe if I help him out with this, he’ll think of her once he has his papers? And he’ll bring her to Spain? And she’ll be able to grow up over there, go to school and build a future? And she’ll get out of the shit we’re in here?
In any event, I’m not stupid. I knew that one day or another he’d get the divorce, or he’d get the authorization to have a second wife. Even if it meant sending his baksheesh by boat.
So I said yes.
I made him swear on his mother’s life that he would get papers for Samia when he had his own so she could go live with him. I obtained the divorce through spousal abandonment, and he remarried.
When I announced to my mother that I was divorced, I thought she was going to go insane.
“Are you out of your mind? Are you brain-dead?” she screamed into the telephone.
“Mouy, since the day you met Hamid, you’ve been saying that he’s a loser, and now you’re telling me I’m crazy for divorcing him?” I responded, before explaining to her why I did it.
“As usual, you’re the one who knows best.”
And she hung up on me.
* * *
—
Not long after, I took Samia back. She was four years old. My mother didn’t want to give her back to me. I don’t know why I wanted her back. I had a bizarre feeling, as if two big warm hands were coming out of my stomach and reaching toward the little one to envelop her and put her back inside me.
To be honest, I already told you, I sort of regret not leaving her. She’s starting to grow up and I’m afraid that some charitable soul will open her eyes to what’s going on here. Or that she’ll understand it on her own. And that she’ll say things to arouse Mouy’s suspicions.
I already get strange looks from that bitch teacher at her school. She always scrutinizes me from head to toe, as if she were seeing me for the first time every time.
Teachers look down on everyone. Especially women. They’re not like that with men. When a father goes to speak to them, their arrogance flies out the window. I’m not afraid of them, or of anyone else. I’m polite when I go there and I speak to them with respect, lowering my head. And that’s all.
Last year, Samia had a male teacher. It’s simpler with male teachers, you can always come to an agreement. A man is a man. Once you know that he sees you through his zipper first, your troubles are gone. But women, they’re all vipers.
The first time I met Samia’s female teacher, at the beginning of the first term, she asked me what my husband did for work.
“God rest his soul. He died while she was still in my belly,” I responded, gesturing at the little one, adopting a pitiful expression.
“God rest his soul,” she sighed as if it had happened yesterday. “And what did he die of, the poor thing?” she added, clicking her tongue against her palate.
“A rafter fell on him, he was a construction foreman. It was a very difficult time. All that was left of him were crumbs.”
She tried to look sympathetic, but I could see that she was clearly repulsed.
The little one, even if it bothers her when I tell stories, says nothing. She knows that I’ll make up whatever nonsense necessary to have some peace and quiet. She speaks to her father from time to time. I gave him my Maroc Telecom number when Samia came back to live with me. And he calls her to see how she’s doing.
Now, he lives in a city called Mataró and he’s still waiting for his papers. I’m afraid of one thing: that that whore wife of his—a Moroccan from Meknes who does housework over there—will make things difficult for us. Or that she’ll get pregnant and start to make demands. Or that she’ll feed him some bullshit that will make him even more of an idiot than he already is. We have enough problems without her contributing to them!
So I keep a close eye on him. And since I know him better than anyone, I send him money and that’s how I hold onto him. I know from experience that there’s nothing he loves as much as money. Especially if he doesn’t have to lift a finger for it. In his place, who would dare complain?
WEDNESDAY THE 18TH
I’m still in Berrechid. The clock changed again for Ramadan. I don’t understand any of their stories anymore. When they said that they were moving to daylight saving time to save money, we didn’t flinch. We even thought it was a good idea. Next they decided to do Ramadan hours because it’s summer. I didn’t really understand it, but why not? The problem is that apparently, after Ramadan, it’ll be daylight saving time again, and after Eid, the clocks will go back again. Are they just fucking with us or what? Like we don’t have anything better to do? Adjust your clock. Unadjust your clock! Readjust your clock. That’s enough now!
Hamid, the guard, has just called me because he spoke to the neighbors’ niece, who’s back in Morocco for her work. She wants to meet with me as soon as possible.
“I told her that you would come in three or four days because her idea seemed interesting to me,” Hamid announced, in the distant voice of someone who’s calling from the bottom of a cave.
I couldn’t hear well, and I answered him only half paying attention. I was watching a commercial on TV, thinking it was the best time of year to get a Méditel number. I know there are problems with the quality of their network, but why not? At least I can take advantage of the Ramadan promotion.
“Okay, that’s fine,” I responded, realizing that I didn’t know what I was agreeing to, and I added: “Wait, what did you say, you told her I would come? Now you’re telling her things on my behalf? Also, I can’t come in three or four days. I’m busy.”
That girl left me hanging for a month and now she wants me to drop everything? Well now it’s her turn to wait! News story or not, those people who live abroad are all a bit nuts.
Right now, since it’s summer, there are plenty of them here. All those emigrants who have houses in our neighborhood come back to spend Ramadan with their families. And I don’t have to tell you how unbearable they are.
The other day, Khadija, the neighbor who has a house next to a power station and who lives in Belgium, left her son at our house because she had an errand to run and she wanted Mouy to look after him. Her son is a real spitfire. He wouldn’t stop jumping. He flew from mattress to mattress. With his shoes on too. When my mother saw him, and when he wasn’t expecting it, she tripped him, putting her right arm under the brat’s legs at the very moment when he was launching for a jump. He rolled two or three times in the air before crashing onto the floor, like the divers you see on television. He was lucky there was a carpet.
Now, when his mother brings him to the house, he’s more calm.
But in Belgium, his mother told us, the school sent the cops over to her house because she had hit him when he wasn’t letting her clean in peace. The boy told the teacher and the teacher called the police. After that, how do you expect the kids to be normal?
So this crazy woman who wants to talk to me, I don’t trust her.
“Tell her we’ll meet after Eid, it’s not so far from now,” I said to Hamid.
“Ramadan started barely seven days ago. What are you talking about?”
Without waiting for my response, he continued: “Listen, this is between you two. I did my job giving you the message. I’ll tell her about Eid and after that don’t involve me anymore. What’s in it for me in the end?”
And he hung up.
Mouy is hovering to try to guess who I’m talking to. I see her there but I let her turn in circles. That’ll teach her to annoy me. Just now, she yelled at me to help her with the cleaning instead of sitting in front of the TV “like a couch potato.”
“Who are you talking to?” she says, pretending not to really care about the answer and continuing to polish the wall, tracing zeros with her rig ht hand.
God only knows what she’s rubbing at. It’s so clean that the only thing that could happen now is for the zellige to peel off onto her rag.
After so much practice, the lie comes out on its own. “No one, a guy who finds me work for different companies. He wants to place me with a woman who’s looking for someone to organize her office.”
“And that’s how you talk to people who are doing you a favor? You speak as if I hadn’t raised you properly,” she says, turning her head to look at me.
Her hand has stopped swirling on the wall.
“Some favor. I give him my first two weeks of work to pay for his services. I’m not going to be a kiss-ass on top of it.”
And we each return to our business. Me to my television. And her to her exercise.
MONDAY THE 20TH
The days go by. The wind blows and carries the days with it. Ramadan is over. Eid is over. Samia stayed with my mother. I went back to Casa.
I’m with Hamid in his shed and we’re waiting for the neighbors’ niece.
The day is almost over but it’s still hot. And my djellaba is clinging to me. I tried pulling on the sides and the bottom to stretch the fabric for it to cling less, but it was no use. And sweat is turning the inside of my thighs all wet.
This summer doesn’t want to end.
On the television, the king is meeting someone once again. He’s in America. The French president—or whoever that gnome is—is standing next to him. Honestly, I wouldn’t say no to a job like his. I’d get to travel, see the world, and give speeches on television.
But to tell the truth, if I were in his place, I wouldn’t travel to those middle-of-nowhere places he normally goes. Now, he’s in America, that’s fine. But normally, you should see where he goes: Ben Guerir, Asilah, Ouarzazate. I want nothing to do with that. I would only go to high-class countries. Europe, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico. I’d leave the deserts to the beggars.
I would never wear the same outfit twice. And if I were hot like I am now, I wouldn’t give a damn. I would walk around naked. And if someone had a problem with it, they could say it to my face. Or even better than walking around naked, I would install a portable AC on myself. I would put it over my head on a hat, it would keep me cool from morning to night and from my hair to my feet. And that would only be for when I want to move around. Because most of the time, I would sprawl out happily in front of the television, in a chilled room, and I wouldn’t move until winter came back. Those who wished to see me would know where to find me.
“Phooey!” Hamid says, his eyes on the door where the curtain has fallen once again. “Am I going to spend my life keeping tabs on that fucking curtain?”
In this inferno, even the nail doesn’t want the fabric rubbing against it.
“Let it go, there’s nothing to do,” I say, ashing into the little teacup placed in the middle of the table.
Hamid still has not fixed the table. Too bad for him. He’ll regret it the day he tastes the tea’s burning kiss on his thighs.
“The stench of armpit isn’t enough for you? You want to add the cigarette stink too?” he says to me.
“Don’t go getting all worked up with me,” I answer, turning to look at him. “I know how to get worked up too.”
And I place my elbows on my knees, spreading my legs because it’s the only position where I get comfortable.
That’s when she arrives. A skinny stick slides her head through the curtain and opens it with a fluid movement. A skinny stick with long disheveled hair at the end. Hamid told me she was the neighbor’s niece but I hadn’t imagined she would be so young. She’s standing in front of the door and she’s looking at us and smiling. Toothy grin. Horse’s mouth! I look at her. She keeps smiling. I want to laugh. I had imagined her like Nassima el Hor*: pale, well padded, well dressed, coiffed, makeup done, put together. And a bit younger, of course; but at least a real journalist!
Instead, standing in front of me is a broom with its bristles dyed brown. She is so skinny that I’m afraid she’s going to snap in two.
Hamid stands up. “Salaam, how are you?” he says, grabbing the curtain to hold it open for her and scratching his head. “It’s hot in here.”<
br />
That moron Hamid makes me want to laugh. As if he were caught in the act of having sex. He looks at me, then at her.
“I’m good, and you?” she responds, smiling at me.
And she reaches out her hand for me to shake it.
“Salaam, how’s it going?”
“Good,” I answer, handing her the tips of my fingers and looking at her out of the corner of my eye.
That pussy Hamid stays planted there, staring at us. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. He decides to go look for a chair outside. When he comes back, he sets it at the entrance and he grabs the shower curtain, which he passes over the rod to trap it there once and for all.
“So, how are you? Everything good? Your family’s good? Your aunt, how is she? It’s been a while since I’ve seen her. Hang on, I’ll make some tea,” Hamid says without pausing to take a breath.
And he gets up to fill a new teapot. I don’t know what’s gotten into him, he’s acting strange. He can’t find the sugar, he’s looking for the tea, he finds it and loses it while he’s cutting the mint. But he carries on talking at the same time. Horse Mouth is relaxed. From time to time, I lift my head from the screen toward one of them. But I don’t speak. I don’t know her and it’s on her to begin, not me.
When he’s done making the tea, he sits, he serves her a cup and he starts up his questions again. And once they know that everything is going well on both sides, they finally stop talking. I don’t know how they managed it but in twenty minutes, they’ve tackled all the subjects on earth.
Her family is still in the Netherlands, and she’s here with her aunt. Hassan, her aunt’s husband, had a car accident. Hamid knows him and recommended a guy to fix his door. The guy inflated the price as much as possible because the other man was at fault and in any event, the insurance would pay. Her plane was late. The cold arrived early this year in the Netherlands.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth Page 8