by Laila Lalami
8
HEIR TO THE PAST
RAMADAN CAME, WITH its slow days and busy nights. Because most bars were closed for the entire month, Nabil brought a friend of his to the apartment for drinks, introducing him as Farid Benaboud of Casablanca Magazine. Youssef recognized the name; this was the man Hatim complained about incessantly. Nabil presented Youssef as his cousin’s nephew, who had come to visit from Moulay Driss Zerhoun, near Meknès. The journalist seemed not to suspect anything—didn’t everyone have lost relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins from a small town, people whom one hardly thought of except on those occasions, every few years, when they visited?
Benaboud was doing a piece on the economy. The government had launched yet another campaign to promote Morocco to wintering Europeans looking for sun and sand and the obligatory bit of the exotic, and Benaboud wanted to know whether Nabil Amrani thought this campaign might work. When Nabil spoke, his voice had a different cadence, as though he were reading from a prepared text. “We do have the capacity, of course,” he said, “to attract more tourists, from around the world. The Ministry of Tourism was right to call Morocco “the most beautiful country in the world.’ We do have a beautiful country. That is not the issue at all. The issue, frankly, is that the Islamists are giving us an image problem. You have Jean-Pierre or Marie-Louise sitting at home in Paris, they see people like those imbeciles from the Party on the TV news, screaming about how everything in this country should be done ‘by God,’ or ‘with God,’ or ‘through God,’ so of course Jean-Pierre and Marie-Louise get scared, and they decide to go to Mar-bella instead of Marrakech for their Christmas holidays.” He paused, allowing Benaboud enough time to write down what he had said.
“But aren’t you giving the Party more credit than they deserve?” Benaboud asked. “There are plenty of tourists around. They don’t seem to pay attention to the Party.”
“No. These people—they don’t want what’s best for the country. We do. We’re creating jobs; we’re offering training; we’re providing services. But what are they doing? Preaching!” He had spoken so fast that flakes of peanut appeared around the edges of his mouth.
“They are popular for a reason,” Benaboud said. “Maybe they have serious concerns about how the country is being run, just like everyone else.”
“The country is doing fine, if they will just let it be.”
At this, Benaboud sat back in his chair. “But are the jobs you’re creating really helping? If you’re creating a hundred jobs at fifteen hundred dirhams a month, how are people supposed to live on that? They’re still going to live below the poverty line and they won’t be able to send their children to school.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Nabil said, putting a second peanut into his mouth. “Do you want another beer?”
“Yes, please,” Benaboud said.
“I’ll get it,” Youssef said, jumping to his feet. He was grateful for the break in the conversation. Even though he had not said anything, he felt as if he had been gossiping about someone he loved, and en-namima haram. It made him feel guilty. He took his time fetching a beer from the refrigerator and then returned to the living room.
“The government really needs to help our sector,” Nabil was saying. “One problem, for example, is the false guides. It’s impossible for a foreign tourist to have a good time if he’s going to be hounded by guides at every corner. And sometimes, even in the resorts, the tour guides pester them. So we need a more”—he chewed while trying to come up with the right word—“a more muscular approach to this problem. We need state help in ensuring that our tourists can have a good time in peace.” As he spoke, his eyes bulged in indignation, as if it had been he who had been bothered by guides on his way around town. He got up to use the bathroom, leaving Youssef alone with Benaboud. On the stereo, Jacques Brel was singing, and the journalist drummed his fingers along with the rhythm of the guitar.
For lack of anything else to do, Youssef cleared his throat. Benaboud turned to look at him. “What do you think? Do you agree with your uncle?” he asked.
“I never noticed the tourist guides.”
“I guess there wouldn’t be any, in a small village.”
In Youssef’s village, there were no tourist guides, perhaps, but there were plenty of peddlers and smugglers, hustlers and hawkers, brokers and fixers, vendors and dealers, beggars and drifters—all the people who, in the end, made up the other, the greater half of the country. And when he thought of them, something stirred inside him, compelling him to answer. “What’s their crime, anyway?” he asked. He took a sip of his soda, trying to sound as confident as his father had. “The government has outlawed so many things; soon they’ll outlaw making a living.”
Benaboud looked up. “Good line,” he said, carefully writing it down.
“Don’t mind my cousin’s nephew,” Nabil said, returning to his seat. “You know what they say: if you’re not an idealist at twenty, you have no heart, and if you’re an idealist at thirty, you have no brains.”
Youssef was the first to laugh, because he knew it would please his father, and he always delighted in seeing his father’s pleasure. The conversation quickly turned to where it was supposed to lead: an article or a column that would shift the discussion of the government’s latest marketing campaign to a debate over tax breaks and incentives for hotel owners. They continued talking late into the evening, eventually moving away from business matters to personal. “And how old is your daughter now? Ayah, is it?” Nabil asked.
“Ayah, yes. She’s eleven. About to go into the sixth grade.”
“At Lycée Lyautey, I take it.”
“No, we couldn’t get her in. They put us on the waiting list.”
“I know the director. I can talk to him.”
“Really? We were told that we would not make it in this year because there were too many people ahead of us already.”
“Of course you can make it,” Nabil said, with the confidence of a man to whom rules did not apply. “I’ll talk to him. It’s nothing at all. You can’t take chances with your daughter’s education.”
It was already late by the time Farid Benaboud got up to leave, and he seemed to have forgotten Youssef’s name when he tried to shake his hand. Nabil reminded him, “Youssef, my cousin’s nephew.” So went the lie. They became good at it, both of them, Nabil doing the introductions most of the time, but Youssef chipping in when someone asked him who he was, with the exact role that his father had picked for him.
Youssef no longer avoided the doorman, the maid, or the cleaning lady. He began to exchange bonjours and smiles with his neighbors. He spent his days at the university, though his interest in his studies began to wane, his father’s remarks on public schools having turned him into a skeptic.
He was returning home one night when he saw one of his neighbors, the Filali son, from the eighth floor, go into the café across the street. Hoping to strike up a conversation, Youssef followed him.
Filali was seated at a table near the window, talking on his mobile phone. In what seemed like a nervous tic, he was repeatedly tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. Youssef took a seat at the next table; a waiter in a tight black shirt brought him a menu. Twenty different varieties of tea, and none looked good. He ordered an espresso and a slice of chocolate cake. He had been eating so many sweet things lately that his father had warned him against cavities, but he could not resist. He had put on two kilos; his mother said the extra weight suited him.
Filali was talking about getting his laptop fixed, complaining about the service at the computer repair shop. If only he would get off the phone, Youssef could start a conversation. He ate slowly, keeping watch on Filali out of the corner of his eye. When Filali hung up, Youssef turned to him: “Try taking it to the repair shop on Boulevard Zerktouni.”
“Pardon?” Filali said.
“I overheard you talking about your problems with your laptop. I took mine to the repair shop on Zerktouni, and they were able to fix
it in two days.”
“Oh, really? Thanks.”
“I’m Youssef. I think we live in the same building, across the street.”
“Ziyad,” Filali said, offering his hand. “Thanks for the tip.” He texted something on his mobile phone, his thumb working quickly over the keypad, then turned to look at the door.
“You go to school around here?” Youssef asked.
But Filali did not answer. He smiled at a pretty girl who had just walked in. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, and sat down across from him, leaning over to kiss him on the cheeks. Youssef looked around the café, at the patrons absorbed in their own conversations. There was nothing to do but go home.
In June he sat for his second-year exams, which he barely passed. Still, he received a gift of five thousand dirhams from his father. Most of the money was spent on designer clothes, patent leather shoes, belts that came in felt bags, a mobile phone everyone coveted. He spent his summer days at the movies: when he saw everything at the Megarama, he went to the Dawliz, and when he had seen the shows there, he went to the Eden Club. He crisscrossed the city looking for films, and the ushers got used to his arrival, with his soda and his bars of chocolate.
And there were the girls—ah, the girls! How much easier it was to get their attention now. The first one he had met at a café, a brunette with heavy eyeliner and too-dark lipstick. He had taken her to a movie, and when he had opened his wallet to pay for the tickets, she had grinned like a child in front of a candy display. Later she nodded quickly when he asked if she wanted to have a drink in his apartment. And it was true what his friends said: if a girl goes home with you, she will sleep with you. He had barely tried to kiss her when she reached for his belt. They ended up on his bed, and when the moment came, he used one of the condoms he had taken from his father’s drawer. She would be the first of many, the combination of his looks and his new money working like magic.
And yet at night, when he lay down in the dark, in the terrible silence of that empty apartment, he thought of his mother, alone in her little house in Hay An Najat. She would be watching TV, knitting a sweater or folding laundry or shelling sunflower seeds or mending a sock or peeling the skins off boiled chickpeas—she could never stay still. Although he saw her every week at the hospital, he missed her presence at home, the sound of her breathing across the bedroom at night. He thought of Maati, strutting around the neighborhood, in his un-Islamic tank top, showing off his biceps. He thought of Amin, too. By this time of year, the three of them would have started going to the beach, playing volleyball, and smoking hashish whenever they could get any; they would buy bowlfuls of snails in spicy sauce from a vendor by the side of the road, or go home for plates of fried sardines. He wondered whether they were still doing all these things without him. And then his thoughts would circle back to his father. Youssef was ashamed to see he was more like a mistress than a son: he spent hours waiting for a man to show up and was happy only when they were together. What was becoming of him?
August came, and with it an unaccountable sense of gloom. At the Tahiti Beach Club, where he spent idle moments, Youssef could not see the seagulls in the blue sky or hear the breaking of the ocean’s waves without reflecting on the rootlessness of his new life. He usually sat alone at one of the tables, but even when he was with a girl, or with one of the young people who haunted the place, he never felt that he was one of the regulars. Most of the time, he was reduced to being an unwilling eavesdropper. He heard three socialites discuss vaginal reconstruction (“A cosmetic surgeon in Rabat is the person you should go to—I’ll give you his number”); two recently returned NYU students say how much they had missed home (“For me, Morocco is like the Shire in Tolkien’s novels—it’s so beautiful and quaint”); a professional cadre complain about his boss (“She has a degree from here and she thinks she knows better than I—I who went to Ponts et Chaussées”).
He played H-Kayne on the stereo every morning, as if the music could somehow conjure up his mother, his friends, his old neighborhood. One day his father complained. “Don’t you have anything else to listen to?” he asked, loosening his tie. Youssef snapped, “This is the music I like,” and he raised the volume on “Malna.” His father didn’t say anything but stared thoughtfully at Youssef, as if trying to think of a way to negotiate a difficult but crucial turn whose time had come.
“How would you like to work at the Grand Hotel?” Nabil asked. He owned a large stake in it, he said, and would be happy to arrange for a job if Youssef thought he might be interested.
“I’m still in college,” Youssef said, without much conviction.
“I know. But you would work only part-time. Think of it as a job-training course. And if you like it, you can continue there after you graduate.”
Youssef lit a Dunhill. Unlike almost everyone else he knew at university, he had not thought or worried about employment; his mind had been on other things. Even now, with this offer, he could not really think about the job itself. What he really wanted was to meet his father’s family—the wife, the daughter, the new puppy that Nabil had mentioned last week. If this job meant a few more hours with his father, it might be worth it. “Do you work at the hotel, too?”
Nabil chuckled. “No, of course not. I work at my office at AmraCo.”
Youssef felt stupid for asking such a silly question, and then resentful toward his father for making him feel this way. He stamped out his cigarette. “I really don’t know. I’m still in school.”
His father looked at him, his face full of an unusual weariness. “It’s for your own good,” he said at last. “You know as well as I do that your university degree alone won’t lead anywhere in this country.”
Again there was that needless reminder that, despite all the effort he might put into it, his schooling would amount to nothing. Real jobs were for people who went to higher institutes, or engineering school, or medical school—or anywhere abroad. For Youssef, there was only the prospect of a degree and maybe a third-rate job, if he was lucky.
“Getting into the hotel business will be good for you,” Nabil continued. “It will give you some experience.”
Youssef had never thought about “getting into the hotel business” or any kind of business at all, but the phrase suggested something grand, something that had potential. And there was, too, in the way his father had suggested he join the family business, a faint promise that Youssef might follow in his footsteps and be acknowledged as his son.
“But,” Nabil added, “if you’re going to learn the trade, you can’t tell the other employees you’re my son. Because you can’t learn anything if they’re afraid of you. If they think you can get them fired, they cannot teach you anything. You need to learn exactly how things are done at that level, if you really want to see the big picture in the hotel business.”
His eyes looked sincere; his explanation made sense; his tone was calm. But Youssef was afraid to believe. “You’re just afraid they’re going to find out you have an illegitimate son.”
Nabil blinked, surprised by the bluntness. “Why do you react this way?” he asked. “Can’t you see that I have a plan?”
“What plan?”
“By this time next summer,” he said, counting on his fingers, “you will have work experience. You will have a degree. You will get your driver’s license. You will go to London for an internship. And I will get you a position at AmraCo. Then I will speak to my wife.”
Youssef felt helpless before this image his father had drawn. He was his father’s creature, waiting to be trained before it could be shown to the world. Yet he was ready to put up with all of it if, in the end, his father kept his word. There was no reason not to believe him.
9
THE GRAND HOTEL
YOUSSEF RUBBED HIS BARE CHIN, the skin smooth from the close shave earlier in the morning. That had been one of the conditions of employment at the Grand Hotel in Casablanca: no facial hair. Also: no skullcaps, no tribal tattoos, no police record, no qualms a
bout the presence of alcohol. The bellhops wore white jellabas and red fezzes, but all the other employees in the hotel had to wear a suit. Bareheaded women could work anywhere, but those who wore headscarves had to work in the back office. The restaurant was called Al Minzah, but the menus were printed in French. Welcome to Morocco, Youssef thought, no need to experience the real country if a sanitized version can be had instead.
Besides the clothing and grooming rules, the manager, Ahmed Mezzari, explained that certain behaviors were not allowed in front of tourists. “You can say hello and smile,” he said. “But never stare, no matter how they behave or how they are dressed. I’m sure your parents taught you the proverb: Shuf we skut. So look, and keep quiet. If the customers attempt to speak Darija Arabic, never correct their pronunciation. And never, ever, under any circumstances, try to befriend them. Being friendly does not mean being friends.” Now Mr. Mezzari walked Youssef over to introduce him to his supervisor.
Amina Benjelloun sat in her corner office surrounded by piles of dossiers and papers. Framed diplomas and certificates of excellence were displayed on one wall, like a prized stamp collection. In the corner, a blooming white orchid leaned to the right, as if trying to get close to her. She pushed her tortoiseshell glasses up her nose. “Oh, right. Youssef El Mekki,” she said. “Please have a seat.” She waited for Mr. Mezzari to leave before she herself sat down.
“So you’re here for the assistant position?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have any experience in events management?”
“No,” Youssef said, already feeling uncomfortable.
“A degree from a tourism school?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.” She shook her head slowly. It was clear she did not want him for this job, any more than he wanted it for himself, but here they both were, accomplishing the will of Nabil Amrani; after a minute or two, Amina Benjelloun rose to the occasion. She described the Grand Hotel’s events program. “We have eight meeting rooms for professional events, such as conferences and seminars, and for personal ones, like weddings or birth celebrations. I want us to move away from the personal events and focus more on professional ones, which last longer and bring us more income.” She spoke quickly and precisely, moving her hands to emphasize her points. There were no rings on her fingers, he noticed, and she wore a dark pin-striped suit over an immaculate white shirt. Not a single strand of hair was out of place in her chignon. Youssef pretended to understand everything she said.