If I hadn’t been sick, I would never have lost those thirty or forty pounds. I’ve never weighed myself. Generally, I know I’ve gotten bigger when I have to really force my djellaba over the top of my hips. Simple. And now, I know that I’ve gotten much thinner because I had to bring my djellabas to the tailor for him to take them in.
It takes me almost ten minutes to go down the stairs. Horse Mouth doesn’t know yet that I was hit straight on by that stupid motorcycle.
She’s parked in front of the building, head down, rolling a joint. I open the door. She looks at me, spreading her lips over her big teeth:
“Salaam alaykoum,” she says, lifting her head.
I smile back and bend down to enter the car, my healthy leg first. I lean on the roof of the car to keep my balance. I sit down and place my cane to my left. I grab my right leg with my two hands around the knee and I pull it into the car. I make an effort not to breathe too hard.
“Alaykoum salaam,” I say to her as if everything is fine, holding out my hand for her to shake, “long time no see.”
She says nothing. She places her joint in a small compartment under the radio. She glances at my leg and my cane. I don’t know what’s going through her head but it’s painful to see. It looks like she’s fallen ill. Her mouth is still pulled toward her ears but she’s not smiling anymore. She says, half-worried, half-curious, “Aye, aye, aye, aye, are you okay?”
She hasn’t even seen my knee yet. Where the scar is, the skin is swollen, blue and thin like puff pastry. And the scar is long, fat and violet.
Horse Mouth snorts, shaking her head quickly from left to right, and since I don’t respond to her question, she adds, “What happened to you?”
If I were in the mood, I would have made up some wild story. But I’m already starting to sweat and I don’t really feel like laughing. I don’t know why I told her we could meet.
“I was hit by a motorcycle. A guy ran into me and then took off.”
“Pffft, I was afraid. I thought you’d been beaten up in a brawl,” she responds, bringing her hand to her chest, relieved.
“A brawl?” I ask. “What do you take me for, a chemkara*?”
Honestly, that could easily have been the case, or something worse, who knows? But I don’t tell her that.
“Sorry. It’s just that in the screenplay, there’s a brawl that takes a bad turn. I think I got overexcited from being so inside the story. But what happened exactly?”
“A guy on a motorcycle ran into me and fled the scene. I had to have surgery, but now I’m okay. And you, how are you?” I sulk.
She’s not going to insist anymore, I know her now. She hesitates but eventually responds, “Things are good. Fine.”
She doesn’t know what to say.
To be honest I’m sick of it. I’m sweating despite the cold and this djellaba is bothering me. I’m sick of this leg. And I’m sick of this cane. And these pills, I don’t think they’re working on me anymore. I have to take something or I’m going to lose it.
She goes straight to the bar. We’re in front of the door. The car clock shows five in the evening.
We cross the street and it takes us some time. We sit in the front room. Horse Mouth calls the server and she orders “two Spéciales, my brother,” without asking what I want.
It bothers me. I’ve already lit a cigarette and in four puffs, I’m almost halfway through.
“No, I’m not drinking anything,” I say to the server, wagging my index finger no.
I turn toward her and say: “I’m on medication. I can’t drink.”
“Let’s go then,” and without waiting, she yells toward the server: “Si Mohamed!* Sorry, cancel the order. We forgot something.”
It’s a lie that I can’t drink. But I’ve started to be careful. Otherwise, this could all end badly. I’ve set myself a limit: not a drop touches my lips before six. I spend the day waiting for six o’clock so that I can pour the liquid down my throat, onto my tongue. And the problem is that once I’ve had a drop, my body demands more. And soon, I can’t control myself anymore. I drink until I’m knocked out. All alone in my room. Or with Samira if she’s not working.
You know, the days go by slowly when you stay sitting in the same room having a conversation with yourself. Samira comes to see me, the other girls too from time to time, but everyone has their own life to live. People are afraid you’ll rub off on them. But to find yourself alone, again, that’s not the real problem. The real problem is money. And the problems that arise when you don’t have it. I need to get myself back on the stairs soon because Houcine is starting to lose his patience with how little I’m paying him right now.
He hasn’t asked me for anything. And he hasn’t come to see me. But I can sense his tension, even from afar. You never hear me talk about him because he and I don’t have a problem. But we have a good relationship because I play by the rules, and even when I’m sick, I honor my commitments. At the end of each month, I find him somewhere, I give him money, and he puts it in his pocket and leaves until the next time.
At the be ginning, it bothered me. He would watch over me like death at the bedside of the sick. He was afraid I was trying to dodge him. After each client, I would find him behind me. As if making sure I wasn’t trying to rip him off. And then when he understood that I wasn’t causing any trouble, he returned to his business. I’ll admit that more than once I thought of taking off and ditching him. But then, each time, something happened to make me change my mind. Like this one day, there was a guy who had done his business and then thought he could go back to his life, skipping over the small matter of paying up. In my room, in an attempt to take care of it without causing a scene, I told him it would be better for him to hand it over now before he regretted it. He responded, puffing out his chest: “Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it if I don’t cough it up?”
“You don’t want to know what I’m going to do if you don’t cough it up.”
“Yeah, sure. Go on then, show me,” he said, pulling up his pants.
And he opened the door, looking at me from above, like the hero in an American movie. I gave him a weak “go fuck yourself” and followed him out, quickly. I won’t tell you how he ended up, our hero. Before reaching my room, I had seen Houcine leaning against a car joking around with a man, a Spanish guy—José Lechetta they called him. He’s missing a piece of his tongue. Apparently some chick cut it off with a razor. I’m not telling you these details to scare you, only to give you an idea of the kind of guys Houcine keeps company with.
So, that moron who didn’t want to pay, he walked out without wondering why I hadn’t caused a scene. He was just happy to be out of my bedroom with his pockets as full as his balls were empty. I promise you, that day, the guy regretted all that liquid: the liquid he spurted onto my mattress, the liquid assets he guarded in his pockets, and what came out of his nose when Houcine and his friend beat him up opposite the guy selling donuts.
Even so, he was lucky, because Houcine and his buddy, they gave him a break, offering each other the choice cuts. Here, you take the thigh, it’s nice and tender. No, no, you have the honor, you’re my guest today. The guy emerged from that impromptu celebration like a piece of bone in a chicken tagine: all gnawed on.
And so, every time I think I’m going to ditch him, and even though Houcine taxes me as much as the State does on alcohol, I always reconsider, because with him at least I can have peace of mind. What bothers me is that right now I’m broke. My savings aren’t infinite. And all that alcohol isn’t going to help me get back on my feet.
The other morning, I was so wasted when I went to sleep that I woke up on the rug. I had fallen from my bed in the night and I hadn’t even realized. When I woke up, I had two open stitches on my leg. I was lucky that day. The wound could have popped open like a zipper.
When I saw myself in that state, I decided to do som
ething. So now, I drink every night but only a little. It’s the only trick I’ve found that works. That and the pills, of course. They calm the nerves but let me tell you, they also quench my thirst. They cloud my mind a bit, but they work. So, tonight, Horse Mouth or no Horse Mouth, I refuse to drink before six o’clock.
“Let’s take a little drive along the coast instead?” she says to me, opening the door.
I’m tired of all of it. I don’t want to open my mouth, not even to ask her to bring me back home.
We arrive at the beach right at sunset. She parks the car next to Sidi Abderrahmane and she retrieves the little joint she’d stashed under the radio.
I hand her my lighter because I have no desire to watch her writhe around in every direction looking for her own. Rather than taking it, she hands me the joint for me to light it. Then she takes it back, saying, “I forgot you don’t smoke.”
Horse Mouth turns toward me and says, smiling, happy, “I got the money. All the money I asked for.”
And after a long puff, she adds, “We start filming at the beginning of April.”
“That’s great. Will you stay here until then?”
Rain starts to fall in fine tiny drops. I lower the window to feel the sea. It’s strange, I’m not dizzy. And it’s strange, in this moment, I see the world through the eyes of a sick person. As if I were going to die.
Horse Mouth, spitting out the tobacco sticking to the end of her tongue, responds, “No, I’m leaving for two weeks in March.”
I had forgotten that I had asked her a question. From the ground, she picks up the enormous bota bag she uses as a purse. It’s the same color as her jacket. And her shoes. Since the first time I met her, she’s worn the same clothes: the same jacket, the same blue jeans, the same pale T-shirt and the same leather boots. They’re falling apart and the tongues hang down on each side of her foot. They’re terrible, but to each her own.
She riffles through her bag for something, pushing around the objects inside.
She takes out a parcel and hands it to me. It’s covered in shiny black wrapping paper, with red and yellow flowers. And a gold ribbon wrapped around it.
“What is it?”
She’s annoying me. I’m sick of her smile and her giant mouth.
“Just a little something. Take it. Open it.”
She adds, “I wanted to thank you. What you told me really helped me to write the story.”
The paper refuses to rip. It’s not normal wrapping paper. It’s as if it were made out of plastic. I pull on the gold ribbon. It doesn’t want to open either. Oh well. I’m pissed off. I put the paper in my mouth and try to tear with my teeth as hard as I can. A piece of the wrapping gets stuck between my teeth. I spit it out the window. Fuck, what moron makes wrapping paper like this? I throw the shitty package in front of me. It knocks against the glove compartment before falling to the ground at my feet.
“Fuck, I’m sick of all of this,” I complain, pushing open the door. Pffft, I say, closing the door again because I can’t get out.
I want to go home. Horse Mouth has been staring at me for a while. She says nothing. She seems to be wondering whether I’ve gone crazy. She grabs her joint from the ashtray, now extinguished, and says, relighting it, “I’ll finish this and we’ll go back.”
We arrive in the neighborhood. She stops at the tabac,* enters, comes back out again with a blue plastic bag which she places on her knees, and we leave.
We arrive at my place. She turns off the engine but we don’t speak. I have nothing to say anyway. She picks up the gift at my feet, jostling my cane a bit. She sits back up and hands it to me along with an enormous pair of blue scissors which she takes out of the bag of the same color.
“If it still won’t open, throw this fucking package out the window for me.”
I take the package and I can’t help but let a smile creep over my lips. She smiles back and says to me, “Take care of yourself.”
And she adds as I lean out of the door to leave:
“And if you need something, anything at all, call me.”
I make a gesture with my hand half to say goodbye and half to signal that I heard her. I close the door and start the climb back to my room all over again.
I run into Samira on the first floor. She grabs my arm and as we climb the steps she asks me, “What is that?” while nodding at the package.
“A girl gave it to me. You don’t know her.”
I have no lie to offer up to her. And anyway, I don’t care. It’s stupid not to talk about it with Samira. As if I were dealing with matters of state. Why should I, with my pathetic life, insist on lying over nothing?
“I’ll tell you once we’re up there,” I answer, leaning against her even more.
* * *
—
We’re in my room. As soon as we entered, I threw myself onto the mattress and Samira gave me a pill.
“So, who is she?” she asks, trying to open the package with her fingers.
“Grab the bottle that’s in the armoire.”
Since I’ve been sick, I keep a small stash of wine in the house. I buy bottles in pairs. Samira looks at me, raising an eyebrow. I’m sure she’s wondering whether I’m trying to kill time to make her forget her question.
She puts down the package and gets up. She brings back the bottle and pours us each a glass. I take a sip and since the glass is small, I empty it in one gulp. It feels good.
“So, who is she?” she repeats, grabbing the scissors to cut the ribbon.
* * *
—
I told Samira about Horse Mouth without going into too many details. While I was telling her about Hamid, the day we met in the shed and about the film, Samira kept quiet, the gift between her hands. She wasn’t looking at me but I could tell she wasn’t very happy. Her lips twisted in one direction, then the other.
Now, with all that’s happened, I don’t even know anymore why I didn’t tell her about it. But what exactly would I have told her? That I met a girl who asked me to tell her stories to help her with a film? Do I look like I have a face for movies?
It’s not that I didn’t trust Samira, it’s just that I didn’t know she would be the one standing at my side.
I didn’t know that she would be the one to sell my two bracelets, my necklace, my scarves to pay my rent, when I had Houcine, the hospital, and all the shit weighing on my shoulders.
I didn’t know that she would cook for me, that she would do my laundry, that she would come to see me every day.
And when I had nothing left to sell, how could I have known that she would call Chaïba to borrow money from him and that she would offer for me to live with her if I needed?
How could I have known that she would be this good of a friend? I don’t think even she knew it.
And now that I’ve finished telling her, she’s frowning about the Horse.
In case she doesn’t know, I’ve already got a mother who watches over me and sulks. I don’t have room for a second. If she’s not happy, she can go fuck herself.
“Yeah, well, what I think,” she says, handing me the contents of the package, “is that there’s no film, no nothing. That girl, she’s a freak who has her sights set on you and that’s it.”
And she adds, “If you had told me, we could at least have really gotten something out of it, more than these trinkets.”
I look at the gift. It’s a gray scarf, with pink, yellow, and green flowers, very delicate. Silver edges. Next to it, there’s an enormous barrette in the shape of a flower. And there’s a bag. Gray, with just one flower on the side. Pink. Very chic.
I take them. I don’t answer her. Samira’s nonsense has nothing to do with this gift. I think she’s jealous, that’s all.
“Anyway, I’m done with her. I won’t see her again after today,” I say, pouring myself another glass.
/> MONDAY THE 7TH
Horse Mouth called me several times since the other day, I didn’t answer. When I make a decision, I don’t go back on it.
I’m lying in front of the television, under two sheets. I just got back from the baths. I took off my djellaba and put on my new robe. It’s green and soft as a lamb. I wrapped my head in one of those turban towels that look like hats. I have the new kind that fastens with Velcro.
It’s incredibly cold. I light a cigarette and pour myself a small glass. It must be seven or eight at night, I don’t know. I feel good. And my leg is better. It still hurts me from time to time but it’s a lot better.
I’ve been resting a lot lately, actually. I’ve been watching TV, not eating a lot, sleeping. And I’ve stopped trying to be a hero. Because even in films, when the heroine is sick, she rests in bed.
And on top of all that, I decided to stop worrying about other people. I care so little that even when my husband called me to yell because I hadn’t sent him any money since the accident, I let him shout his head off without yelling back. He can climb out of the receiver if he feels like it.
You know what he did the day when I told him I was hit by a motorcycle? Nothing. He went quiet, he muttered a quick “May God heal you” and hung up. I’m sure he was thinking of only one thing: the money I send him every month. Asking himself whether or not the faucet would run dry.
So now he can fuck off.
I take a long drag of my cigarette.
Since seeing her at the hospital, I haven’t called Mouy. I can’t. The only contact I still have with her is the money orders I send for my daughter.
And for almost two weeks now, none of the girls have stayed with me for more than five minutes. None. They can all fuck off! Them and their worthless visits.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth Page 12