Her speech is fluid. Unusual for emigrants. Normally it’s like their tongue is in physical therapy: it needs crutches to get to the end of a phrase.
“I forgot my cigarettes, I’ll go get them, be right back,” she says to Hamid.
Hamid doesn’t have any cigarettes but I know that he’s waiting for me to offer her mine. I take my pack from the table and hand it to her, continuing to stare at the screen.
“That’s nice of you, are you sure?” she asks me. I feel her look at me: “I’m always forgetting my cigarettes somewhere.”
The king shakes hands. I nod my head to show that I heard what she said. That idiot Hamid responds, “It happens. The important thing is not to forget who you are.”
Philosophy, that’s just what we need! And he’s serious too! Now he’s posing like a stud, smiling, and he adds as if he were Imad Ntifi*: “So, your aunt told me you were working on something?”
“I’m working on a film. For the cinema. I’m a director.”
She takes a long drag on her cigarette and continues. “I’ve already worked on several shorts and with directors who’ve made features.”
And she adds, “This film I want to make, it’s my first feature-length. I’ve almost finished writing the story. But I wanted to make sure that it’s not too far off from reality. That’s why I wanted to meet…”
And she turns her head toward me because she doesn’t know my name.
Now that pisses me off! Can you believe that, a director who doesn’t know the name of the person she’s meeting with? I give her a dirty look, like I got up on the wrong side of the bed.
Once again, Hamid answers for me. “Jmiaa. Her name is Jmiaa.”
“Great, you know what? I’m going to suggest something. If you’re okay with it and you don’t have anything to do right now, let’s get out of this shed and go somewhere else. For a bit of fresh air.”
And she gets up as if I’d said yes.
“Is there a place you like to go? Or else, we can just drive around if you prefer.”
She’s standing under the rod. I don’t know what to do. To tell the truth, I like movies even more than television or the newspaper. She asks Hamid where the key to the car is. He takes it from the board where all the keys for the garage are and hands it to her. She takes it and turns to me. “Let’s go?”
I get up and follow her. She gets into a crappy white Renault, starts the engine, and we leave the garage at full speed. The car sails through the packed Casa streets. Horse Mouth slaloms without slowing. As she drives, she searches all over and finally finds her cigarettes in the glove compartment. She sits back up, takes one, and throws the pack behind her. “I was so happy the day Hamid told me that you wanted to meet with me.”
She turns her head toward me, smiling, and she changes gears with the hand holding her extinguished cigarette.
“Is there a particular place you’d like to go or is it all the same to you?”
“All the same.”
Honestly, I could really go for a beer right now. She looks straight ahead and she says, “What we need in this weather is a nice cold beer.”
And she adds, “That sounds good, right? What do you say?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you want is fine by me.”
“I know a good place, just here.”
She hasn’t even finished her sentence when the car takes a sharp left turn and launches between the palm trees lining the avenue. The cafés are packed. Around here, it’s almost all students. Some are pretending to study and some don’t bother. They hang around the park, trying to look like rockers with their crazy hairstyles. Mohawk here, mohawk there…And cock-a-doodle-doo here, cock-a-doodle-doo there. They’re all the sons of bin-ou-bin.*
That’s what we girls call them, the bin-ou-bin, the guys who don’t know what they’re doing with their lives. There are plenty around here. Respectable father figures who go to work every morning. They have a house, a car, children, but they have no life. They don’t associate with the bearded men but all the same, they don’t stray from the straight and narrow: no alcohol, no women, nothing.
They don’t do it by choice, don’t be mistaken. They do it because they don’t have the balls to choose to be in one camp or the other. So, they do contradictory things. They cloister their wives at home but entrust them with their salaries at the end of the month. They forbid their daughters from going out at night but let them dress like Nancy Ajram* to go to school. They’d prefer that there not be girls like us at the entrance to the market—but when they pass, they lower their heads because they would never dare tell us to leave. That old crazy woman Mbarka knows how to handle them. There’s only one thing you need to know about her, as we say between us, giggling: only half her brain functions. And not the good half. Since she’s crazy, she can do what she likes. But I have an inkling she only pretends so that people leave her alone.
“Hey, I’m-afraid-of-my-own-shadow, look over here!” she shouts in the direction of the poor bin-ou-bin who doesn’t yet know she’s talking to him.
The entire neighborhood turns their head, men included, to see her lift her djellaba and thrust her pelvis forward in an obscene gesture. And immediately she bursts out laughing with her toothless mouth. We laugh too, while the guy lowers his head and flees the scene as if he hadn’t seen anything.
“Okay, here we are.”
Horse Mouth points at a bar I’ve never been inside but that I know.
We park opposite and go inside. She says hello to two or three people. There are men and women, it’s mixed here. It’s dark like in every bar, and there’s Western music playing. She sits at a table in the back, past the first room and a second bar. It’s like a bar within a bar.
We sit down. She gets up to buy cigarettes because she forgot hers in the car and she comes back with a pack of Camels and places them on the table.
“I’m going to have a Spéciale. And you?”
“Me too.”
How did I find myself here so quickly? I have no idea.
She comes back with two beers in her hand. She sits down and drinks directly from the bottle. She lights another cigarette and starts to talk.
* * *
—
There are a good dozen bottles in front of us. And the butts of Camels and Marvels intertwined in the ashes. This girl is crazy. I underestimated her, based on her mosquito size. But she can hold her alcohol.
She told me some of her life story and a lot about the film she’s working on. I didn’t catch everything, but the important part is that she left for the Netherlands when she was three and she’s lived over there ever since. She comes back to Morocco every summer. Now, she’s going to produce the film between the Netherlands and Morocco. It’s the story of a girl who earns her living as a prostitute. The girl, whom she hasn’t named yet—but she’s deciding between Jamila and Hasna—meets a man. They hit it off and get together, more or less. They rob a jewelry store. And after they succeed, he rolls in the dough and takes off. And at the end there’s a twist that I don’t fully understand. And I don’t remember anymore who comes out on top. A story like any other.
And she just wants to chat with me so I’ll tell her what my life is like. That’s all. And she has a small budget for it, but first and foremost, she wants to know what I think about it.
“About what?”
“About what I told you. The film, the story…Everything, really.”
“It’s good. It seems good to me. I don’t know.”
“Could it happen in real life? Could a girl fall in love with a guy and find herself robbing a jewelry store with him? Could she be scammed like that? What do you think? I don’t know if it could really happen that way.”
“…”
This girl might be crazy. She gathers her hair in a long ponytail at the top of her head. Some strands fall to the side.
> I don’t know why she’s bothering with these questions. If you want to make a film, make a film and be done with it. She continues, “I’m also trying to imagine the ambiance. It would be filmed in my aunt’s neighborhood. Next to the market, with the setting exactly the way it is. Maybe we’ll change a few things, but we wouldn’t touch the trash. Did you see how bustling it is over there? Hang on, I’m going to get another beer.”
She weaves between the bin-ou-bin boys and comes back with the beers.
“Okay, you know what, in any case, we have time. We’ll talk about it another day.”
Honestly, she makes my head spin.
* * *
—
We stayed in the bar until they kicked us out. It must have been one in the morning. I don’t know how many Spéciales we downed, but by the end beers covered the table.
Now, we’re sitting in the car staring at the water. You can’t tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. It’s more distinct between the water and the sand. The waves, when they break, form huge braids of white wool. My nose is full of the smell of the sea. And I’m so drunk that I’m not even dizzy anymore.
Leaving the bar, Horse Mouth didn’t take the road through the neighborhood. She turned left. I don’t care. I’ve had so much to drink that I could go to Tangier if she wanted. She drove until we arrived at the corniche. There was almost no one in the streets. When we arrived, we drove slowly, looking at the seaside as we worked our way down the coast, until we reached Sidi Abderrahmane, directly across from the island.
We’re not talking right now, but when we were at the bar, she talked a lot. I couldn’t understand everything she said.
Basically, she came to Morocco to finish writing her story and to find locations to shoot. Now she’ll return to the Netherlands to look for money from a producer to make the film. That part, for example, I didn’t really understand.
If she doesn’t have money, how is she going to make her film? And how has she almost finished writing it? And why does she want to keep the Casa streets as they are, why does she want everything to be as it is in real life? Why does she think people watch movies? To see the nasty reality or to get a change of pace and have a laugh?
Maybe it’s the weed that’s put those ideas in her head.
At the bar, while I was eating, I know she got up to smoke a few joints. She must have had two or three over the course of the night. When she came back her eyes were a bit glassy, completely calm. I know that look.
Also, she has a smoker’s hands. Skinny and dark and a bit yellow at the tips. Now, she’s just rolled another. The first one she’s had in front of me. She hands it to me to light it.
“No, I don’t smoke.”
“You don’t like it?” she says, lighting it and taking a long drag, her eyes half-closed, head slightly tilted back.
“I have a bad history with hashish. It’s a long story,” I tell her, seeing my husband’s face in front of me.
“Mmmh…” she says, taking a puff.
I don’t know if it’s because the hashish is good or if it’s in response to what I said. But I don’t care. It’s nice out, the drive was cool, and I feel good. We don’t have music in the car. There’s a radio but the FM button spins and spins. There’s only the CD player, which works, but she doesn’t have any CDs, she says.
“Next time, I’ll bring Nass El Ghiwane.* Do you like them?”
“I don’t know them. Is it chaabi*?”
“No. When you listen, you’ll tell me if you like it. What kind of music do you like?”
Without thinking, I respond, “Najat Aatabou, do you know her?”
“Who doesn’t know Najat Aatabou?”
She takes another drag and looks at the water. I light a cigarette.
When I think about it, in the end, I barely spoke that night. We ate, we drank, we drove. We talked a bit about Hamid. The neighborhood. And that’s it. Leaving the bar, she took my number and asked if there was a good time for her to call me.
Then, she asked me to reflect on the film and whether I wanted to work with her or not. She also said that if I were to accept, we would talk about the money later.
And then she drove us here. That’s all.
TUESDAY THE 21ST
When I’m lying in my bedroom, I never lock the door. It bothers me to have to get up every time one of the girls needs to borrow a tray, a bowl, or whatever else. Whoever wants something knocks, enters, and leaves again. And if they find the door locked, they come back later. And in their rooms, it’s the same. We live like good neighbors.
The only problem with this system is that you can’t control the comings and goings. Just now while I was sleeping, Samira came in, she woke me up and I can never get back to sleep. Samira is sitting on Samia’s mattress. She’s smoking a cigarette.
I’m not used to this room without my daughter yet. When I wake up, I turn to look at her mattress and find it empty. Halima is also gone. But in her case, it’s for the best, I won’t cry over her.
In the end, she got lucky. When Houcine told her to gather her things and clear out, she had an escape plan. Honestly, I get why Houcine fired her. She was taking up space for no reason. Imagine: no one even looked at her in the street! Or else just the perverts. She piqued their interest with her saintlike attitude, she must have reminded them of their sister or their mother or who knows.
Before I went to Berrechid, I spoke to Houcine about getting her out of my room. Frankly, I was very patient. I gave her time, I encouraged her to make herself at home. Anyone else wouldn’t have waited a week to throw her out. Because having someone like that on your back all the time, it’s impossible. It’s true, she’s nice and well mannered…But that’s not the point. Always depressed, always hurting somewhere, always looking like a wounded dog…
The other day, before going to my mother’s for Ramadan, I left her at my place but I told Houcine to get her out. In any event, I think he was already planning on it. She didn’t earn enough with her jinxed face. And on top of it, I don’t think he liked fucking her. That’s what he does with the new girls. Under the guise of teaching them how to work. We’re in charge of the theory and he takes care of the practice. Until he gets bored. To be honest, for a man who is supposed to be teaching you things, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. It’s only that idiot Hajar who doesn’t realize it. When he calls her, she’s thrilled. She thinks she’s won something. Like when you collect Coca-Cola caps and once you have them all, you get a scooter.
He stopped hanging around me a long time ago and I like it better that way. Although, from time to time, he decides he wants to. He looks around, sprays himself here and there, like a dog when it wants to show the neighbor’s dog that this is his territory.
I act with him like I do with all the others. If I feel like it, I act happy: I bray, I meow, I let him pull my hair or turn my ass red. Otherwise, I wait for it to pass. And my ass gets red anyway. Houcine isn’t my type. He’s too skinny, and with his patchwork of scars I worry he’ll tear apart when he blows his load. I never did ask Halima what she thought of him. But to tell the truth, I don’t care. All I care about is that he sent her packing.
So the other day, the boy who works in the drugstore came to change the lock on the armoire and give me a new key, I locked my things inside and I hit the road.
Samira told me what happened next. After Houcine spoke to her, Halima packed her bag and left. She didn’t yell, she didn’t cry. She did nothing: she just took her things, gave my keys back to Samira and left. Apparently, for some time, Halima had been visiting an elderly aunt on her father’s side who lived in the old town, behind the clocktower. She lived alone, in a single room. That aunt—perhaps she was senile—agreed to see Halima despite what had happened with her husband. And Halima was happy because she felt she would go crazy doing this work.
You know, I think at the begin
ning she thought it would be easy. You show up, you do this for a little while, and then you move on to something else. The poor thing! If it were so simple, wouldn’t there be more girls in the streets? Why does she think the girls smoke so many joints? Why does she think the girls self-medicate? Why any of it? It’s because you need balls to be able to do this work. And not everyone has them.
Halima didn’t last six months. Before leaving, she told Samira that she was going to live with her aunt and that she would work for a charity in her neighborhood. I don’t know if she’d already found work or not.
“Actually…” I say, turning to Samira, “do you know where Halima’s going to work?”
“Not exactly, but she talked about something connected to a religious organization with that nut they call Cheikh Yassine,* do you know him?”
“Yeah…”
“Or a charity for underprivileged children or something like that. Or both. I don’t remember.”
Samira was getting her wires crossed. But I didn’t need to know any more than that. Basically, yet another clueless idea, the idea of someone who hasn’t found anything better to do. Helping others! As if her own mess wasn’t enough for her.
“And they’re going to pay her?” I ask Samira.
“I don’t know. She told me that she would also give private lessons for children in the neighborhood to help them with their homework.”
Samira is sitting on the mattress and I stand to tidy up, to fold clothes and put them in the armoire.
I answer Samira while holding a sweater beneath my chin:
“Ha ha ha! Is she going to live in Maârif? Where does she think she’ll have neighbors who’ll have the money to pay for lessons in the old town?”
She really is an imbecile, that Halima.
“I don’t know. But why not? If the prices are within their means, why not,” Samira responds.
And she adds, “After all, she has somewhere to stay. She just has to make enough to buy food if she wants her aunt to keep her around. She can charge 400 rials per lesson. And do three lessons a day. Can’t they both eat with 1200 rials per day? She and her aunt?”
Straight from the Horse's Mouth Page 9