Straight from the Horse's Mouth

by Meryem Alaoui

  Maybe he regrets not having taken more from Horse Mouth. Or maybe he milked her good but he’d decided that two milk cows are better than one. Who knows.

  The girls are on the stairs. Samira isn’t there. She’s probably already left with someone. They’re sitting and talking about all the prices that have gone up: flour, tea, tomatoes. When they have nothing left to say on the subject, they go quiet. Those who have cigarettes smoke them.

  Now, one of them is taking about the taxi strike. They have been parading through the streets on Sunday, leaning on their wailing horns because—apparently—they don’t care for the new road safety rules. No one answers her. Because in fact, nobody cares. It’s not the horns that are going to make the clients disappear. And on top of it, none of us have ever held a steering wheel in our lives.

  So, they talk about cigarettes, which they say are going to become even more expensive, and the price of beer, which has gone up this summer. They’re starting to drive me crazy.

  If it weren’t so early, I would have had something to drink. I’m sick of it.

  “Are you going to do a full recap of the news, or what?”

  “What’s up with you? Having a bad hair day?” responds Hajar, insinuating that I’m only complaining because I got up on the wrong side of the bed.

  She stares me down. What business is it of hers? She might be in a bad mood, but mine is far worse.

  “You think you can talk to me like that? Who do you think you are?” I say.

  “Your mother! Who do you think?”

  And then we all get up at once. I jump on her and try to rip out her mane of hair. Her scarf is in my hands. Her scarf and a good clump of hair. She scratches my face. And in less than two seconds, the others have separated us.

  That whore knows she has to be the one to move and she stumbles up with her friend, who follows her to go sit under the porch of the store opposite. As they go, they keep turning back to insult me.

  The others—who stayed by my side—tell her she’d be better off keeping her mouth shut. She scratched my temple, that whore. And with her lioness nails, she tore the skin. I’m bleeding. What a shitty day!

  The girls look around to see if Houcine is nearby. Although he usually stays out of our business, he can’t stand it when we cause a spectacle in the street. If he had seen us, he would have gotten his fist involved. And today, I am not in the mood to keep quiet, not for a fist or for anything else. I would have smacked him too and then who knows what kind of mess I’d be in.

  But she was asking for it. She’s been pissing me off for a while now, and I’m mad at myself for not mangling her face.

  You know what she did the other day? The day when I was with Horse Mouth and I didn’t answer Chaïba’s call? She clung to him until he finally went with her. Even though she knows perfectly well that he’s mine. And that son of a whore only went with her to piss me off. He couldn’t stand that I didn’t pick up, that baby. And he knew perfectly well that it would get back to me. When I called him, he didn’t answer and he never even called me back.

  She thinks that he went with her because of her beautiful eyes…Dirty whore! But forget her. And forget him too. Let him do the rounds of all those other whores and when he’s done and comes crying back to me, we’ll just see what happens. We’ll see which one of us doesn’t pick up the phone.

  THURSDAY THE 20TH

  I’m sitting by the window in my room. It’s the end of the afternoon and the window’s closed because it’s cold. It might rain today.

  From here, I can see glimpses of sky and several clouds. On the mattress to my right is a page from a newspaper to catch the shells of the pepitas as I eat. I’ve had so much practice that I don’t even need to look at the page to know they’re landing on it. Right on the head of Ben Ali, the Tunisian president. Serves him right! I don’t care for that thief.

  In the street, I see that crazy girl Anissa fighting with her jinns. She came back to the area a few days ago. I’m waiting for Horse Mouth, who should be here any minute now. She’ll call me when she’s out front. I hadn’t heard from her since she left for the Netherlands in September or October.

  I’m bored. I’m tired of being bored. And I’m tired of being alone and cycling through the problems tangled up in my head like the yarn in a ball of wool. It’s been years since I’ve been able to distinguish one day from the next, so much do they resemble each other, and now, in less than three months, everything’s gotten mixed up.

  First, the event that started it all, is that I was hit by a motorcycle. Because of some idiot, I was in the hospital for three weeks.

  I was walking peacefully in the street with Samira, I had just passed the market to go to the liquor store that is next to the call shop. It was the beginning of the afternoon. We were on the sidewalk and before we crossed, we slid between two cars to reach the street. I was in front, Samira behind. We were talking. Maybe you think that I turned toward her as I was crossing and so I didn’t see the motorcycle coming? Or else that I was drunk and in the haze of my intoxication I didn’t see what was happening? Well you would be wrong. No, I was walking and just as I was about to cross, I looked left where the cars were coming from and I stepped onto the road. Samira didn’t have the time to cry out before I was struck by that asshole going the other way. He was going the wrong way and driving at full speed.

  As soon as he got up, he mounted his motorcycle and disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.

  Do you think anyone went to follow him? Or came to see whether he’d left me dead or alive? We were in front of a café, and the men sitting at their tables who had witnessed the scene wedged even farther into their seats. Sipped their coffees. Free show, what more could you ask for?

  Samira started to scream, the passersby leaned over to see what all the fuss was about. I sat up, glanced at my right leg, touched my bleeding skull, and fainted.

  When I came to, I was still in the street. They had carried me to the sidewalk. Samira was running her hand over my face with water. My right shin was wrapped in a cloth. I think it was my scarf.

  We were waiting for the ambulance that that moron Aziz had called for us. At least he was good for something. And he must have decent connections because the ambulance was there in less than a half hour. It was a shitty ambulance, an old white model, a station wagon. Samira got in with me and we headed for the hospital.

  They shaved part of my skull and started to stitch me up, they did X-rays of my head, my hips and my legs. In the end, I was lucky, because outside of the wound on my head, I only broke part of my leg, just above the ankle. Two fractures that they had to operate on. That’s why I stayed there for three weeks.

  But I was very lucky: they were able to operate on me right away. And it went well. I didn’t even have those skewers that run down your legs like my neighbor in the next bed over.

  In the room where they put me, there were six of us. One of the women had had the same operation as me. Except she had arrived at the hospital six months prior. They weren’t able to do the operation then because her skin was blistering. So they sent her back home and she wallowed there on her back for six months before they would touch her. And the day they opened her up, they found a real mess inside! She told me this story the day when Samira, Fouzia, and Rabia came to see me. All three at once! They brought oranges, bananas, apples, yogurts, dates. As if it were a banquet.

  It must have been three or four in the afternoon. They had walked through the hallways wrangling chairs so they could all sit. And they had paid off the head nurse—people called her Madame Touria—so that she’d leave us alone even if we got a bit noisy. She’s the one who was there when I was admitted, and Samira had already given her a little something.

  Anyway, the girls came in and sat to the right of the bed, in a line. Behind them was the window. Those bastards, of course they put me in a room where you could die of cold. From m
y bed, to my left, I could see the gaping hole that served as the door to the room. The wooden panels had been torn off long ago. There was no curtain separating me from the women next to me. And you could hear everything that happened in the hallway. How do they expect you to recover in a place like that?

  Well, none of that stopped us from making ourselves at home, to be honest. We were sitting and telling stories in turn. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them who I had seen on the television just before my accident. On the Moukhtafoune program, the one where they investigate missing people, there was the story of a guy who had asked them to search for his wife’s sister. He told them she had psychological problems. The channel had been contacted by the Tit Mellil community center. The human garbage dump at the outskirts of Casa. For some time they’d had a patient who looked like the girl in the photo and when they called the station, it turned out to be her.

  They filmed the moments when they brought her out of the center and when she was reunited with her family. When the camera entered the house, where a ton of people were waiting, the TV guys realized there was a problem. There were people arguing.

  “I love when it spirals out of control like that,” said Fouzia. “When family gets involved, chaos always breaks loose sooner or later.”

  The journalists started to ask questions to find out what exactly was going on. It turned out that the stepbrother who had made the call had done it without asking his wife and her brother. And those two scumbags, all while saying that they were very happy to see her again, were also saying that they didn’t have anyone to look after her and that it would pose a problem for them to keep her in the family. That they were afraid she would jump out the window.

  “Afraid she’d jump out the window? Seriously? In my opinion, as soon as the camera’s gone, they’ll open the windows wide to ‘have a breath of fresh air,’ ” said Samira, snorting out of her nose like a horse to show that she wasn’t fooled.

  They spoke of the inheritance that followed their mother’s death. Bizarrely, they were vague about the portion intended for the sick girl, who throughout the entire incident was unaware of what was going on around her. As if none of it involved her. In the end, the brother said that he would keep her at his house. And the episode ended there.

  “Yeah, I know where that inheritance money went,” said Fouzia.

  Her right wrist spun as if she were turning on a faucet and then she slid it toward the pocket of her djellaba to catch the imaginary loot.

  “Yeah,” sighed Samira, “we all know where the money went. But as for the poor girl, that’s another story.”

  “Well, I have an idea,” I said with a big grin.

  And so as not to prolong the suspense too much, I continued immediately:

  “She’s that crazy girl Anissa. During the entire show, I was looking at her and couldn’t believe my eyes. When I recovered from the shock, I laughed for a long time. I spend all my free time staring at the screen and when I finally recognize someone on the television, of course it’s a crazy person.”

  And the girls laughed and the neighbors laughed too. My leg hurt and I asked Samira to turn me onto my right side, apologizing to my neighbor for turning my back to her. Samira propped me on the cushions and as she was arranging my nightshirt, she lifted her head toward the girls and added, “While we’re telling stories, have Jmiaa and I ever told you this one?”

  And she told them, lowering her voice a bit, about a night when something too funny happened to us. It was a long time ago, I don’t even remember when. Fouzia and Rabia hadn’t heard this one before. One night, we had been picked up late. The back of the van driving us to the station was jam-packed. At one point, the van pulled over to the right and stopped. The door opened and there in front of us, we saw three young guys, well dressed, standing there yelling at the cops. The cops didn’t know what to do. and they were saying, looking at the one of the three who seemed to be the leader, “Yes chief, yes chief.”

  “Are you stupid or something? You don’t have anything better to do tonight than pick up the se pieces of shit?” said the oldest of the young guys, the chief.

  And to better imitate the policeman, Samira placed her finger under her nose like a mustache and raised her tone.

  “Okay, okay, chief. We’ll let them go rig ht away, chief,” said one of the idiots in uniform without asking why.

  “Go and run to the square over there instead of hanging around here. There are bottles flying, there’s blood.”

  Once we got out, those of us who’d been in the van didn’t know what to do. There were two or three who bolted without looking back. And Samira and I, along with the others, we stood there staring at the chief and his two lackeys waiting for them to tell us what to do.

  “So, what did you do?” asked Fouzia.

  “Well, the three young guys took their pick,” I answered, laughing. “And she and I were up for grabs.”

  “Wait, I’m the one telling the story,” Samira said, cutting me off and forgetting to lower her voice. “So, they brought us to a house that looked like a palace. With a pool, a giant living room as big as the square with the pigeons. They brought out bottles. You remember?” she asked, turning toward me. “Those young guys weren’t chiefs any more than we were men. What a night!”

  And then, as we carried on laughing, I heard a voice I knew too well say behind me:

  “Salaam alaykoum.”

  My blood boiled. Mouy. Mouy had come.

  * * *

  —

  How long had she been standing at the door? What exactly had she heard? How had she managed to find me? I don’t know. What I do know is that Mouy approached and sat down in the chair Samira offered to her, thanking her with a nod of her chin. And she acted as if she hadn’t noticed that Samira was now left standing. Samia was with her. She was holding her hand. She gave me a kiss and squeezed me in her arms. I think she had been afraid when she heard that her mother had been in an accident.

  Fouzia and Rabia took advantage of that moment to get up and say goodbye. Passing in front of Mouy, they nodded at her. Mouy glared back, scrutinizing them from head to toe. If I had been standing, my legs would have given way beneath me. Instead, I sank into my mattress as one might fall into a well. I thought I was done for.

  That was essentially the case.

  Mouy put in her five minutes, staring straight ahead. She sat upright in the chair. She lifted the sheet with the tip of her fingers to see what was underneath. She asked two or three minor questions. And she left, taking Samia with her. And leaving behind her a small bag in which were two nightshirts, one of hers and one of Samia’s, cakes, a djellaba, and a scarf.

  I haven’t seen her since. And I haven’t spoken to her either. I haven’t been able to call her. And she hasn’t called me.

  How did she know that I was there? It’s a ridiculous story.

  When they admitted me to urgent care, the nurse Touria took my things while the doctor ran some tests. As luck would have it, my mother chose that precise moment to call. Luck, and maybe she’d also had another one of her dreams. Who knows.

  While the doctors examined me, the nurse was in an adjoining room, my things placed next to her. My telephone rang for a long time, it hurt Touria’s ears and she grabbed it to turn it off. She saw “Mouy” on the screen and she answered.

  That’s how life goes sometimes. You don’t know why things happen but they happen. How would the nurse have known that a Jmiaa Bent Larbi* would have purposely not told her mother that she had just been mowed down? How? If it had been at any other moment than in the urgent care unit, or just a few days later, when she knew who she was dealing with, surely she would not have said anything to her. It was unlucky, that’s all.

  * * *

  —

  Horse Mouth is downstairs. I saw her chariot arrive before she called me. I put on my red djellaba because it’s hot out
, and I grabbed my cane. It’s impossible to go down the stairs without it. Honestly, I can’t really manage these three flights of stairs anymore. When I was released from the hospital, even with Samira’s help, it took me an hour to walk up them. Now, things are better. My leg has healed somewhat thanks to the gymnastics they’ve got me doing, but it’s hard. Even though I’ve lost weight.

  Yes, I’ve lost weight.

  One afternoon—I had just gotten back from the hospital—I was tired of lying down in front of the television, watching those images flicking by one after another on an endless loop. I wanted to get up to grab the envelope of photos in my armoire and look through them. I leaned on my right elbow to get up, I took my cane with the other hand, and when I tried to stand up, I felt the weight of my butt pulling me down toward the mattress, like a magnet. Impossible to rise. I was pulling one way and it was pulling the other.

  That’s when I realized that for a good month now I’d only been using two parts of myself: my rig ht hand and my mouth. The former to flip through channels and bring things to my mouth. Anything: cakes, chips, bread, peanuts, pepitas. And the latter to chew and make comments about what was on the screen. And right then, I was afraid.

  My butt sank so far into the mattress that I thought I was glued to the spot. If I let my butt have its way, how would I live? And what would I do about my husband on the other side of the sea, and my mother, and the shitty rent payments that were adding up, and the cigarettes I needed? And all the rest. The medication, the alcohol, Houcine, food. What was I going to do about that?

  It wasn’t hard to lose weight. Each time I wanted to put something in my mouth, Anissa appeared in front of my eyes. Wandering in the street, talking and laughing to herself. I couldn’t fathom that my butt, which had helped me to live all this time, would also be the thing that led to my downfall.

  No matter what I had in my hand, I would drop it abruptly onto the table. Sometimes, I would throw it down so forcefully that it would bounce to the floor. Samira was constantly shouting because I was throwing everything on the ground. So I stopped. Not because of Samira and her diatribes. But because I was afraid that throwing things with no self-control was the beginning of madness. I stayed in my spot watching television and taking pills without eating.