The Last Friend

by Tahar Ben Jelloun

  I thought about telling Ramon. He was like a brother, and I always had a good time with him. I needed levity, laughter, lightness. With Ramon, all of that was possible. Our relationship was not deep enough for him to become teary and melodramatic. I liked Ramon. He had converted to Islam for love! I had to stage a breakup with Ali, pick a fight to ruin everything. What destroys a close friendship? Betrayal. But Ali did not have a seed of treachery in him. It would be total injustice to accuse him of being a traitor. If he had it in him to betray me, he would have done so on other occasions. Breach of trust? He was incapable of that, too. I found myself walking down a boulevard under a cold sun, considering different scenarios to protect our friendship from the tragedy of death. I was torn between the idea of a complete break, with no explanation, no words, and a carefully planned argument.

  I discovered within myself a capacity for perversion, a diabolical imagination and a sick pleasure in toying with the emotions of the people I loved. This distracted me. I staged my illness like a play. I was giving out parts. In the muted Scandinavian light, I was playing with peoples' lives. I was no longer a Moroccan lost in a country that was too civilized; I was no longer a doctor serving the poorest countries of the world; I was no longer the attentive and generous friend; I was in the process of extending my hand to the devil. Was I doing it out of an excess of goodness? It was more likely weakness, cruelty, selfishness. I walked along, talking to myself. No one looked at me. You can talk to yourself without being perceived as insane. In Morocco, when people go out into the streets, screaming in distress and rending their clothes, nobody pays attention. People assume they have lost everything, except their sanity. For us, they are almost saints, touched by divine grace.

  I was refining my plans when I heard a deep and serious voice. I turned around. There was no one there. The voice continued. "You are losing your mind. What is this all about, this idea of sparing your friend, but hurting him terribly? Where did you get this idea? Film noir? Or maybe that movie about jealousy in which a woman persecutes her husband even after he dies, planting evidence that he tried to killed her?" I think it was Mortal Sin with Gene Tierney. It was complicated and terrifying. "No, my friend. Worry about your illness. Take care of yourself. Get better. Let your friends comfort you; let them help you through these hard times. You have no right to be cruel to someone you love, someone with whom you have shared good times and bad. It's some kind of jealousy deep in your soul, expressing itself in a perverse, cynical way. Jealousy is human. It's unfair, but commonplace. Jealousy has nothing to do with reason. Why be jealous of Ali? What does he have that you don't? His health! The most precious of all gifts! He will survive you, he will continue to live out your friendship in sorrow. Then life will take over. He won't forget you, perhaps, but absence and silence will create an eternal distance between you. Sickness has brought out the dark side of your soul. You're listening to it as you plan this diabolical scheme. No, I refuse to believe you are capable of this."

  The voice spoke to me and then was gone. I recalled scenes from the movie Ali liked so much. I remembered when the woman let her young handicapped brother-in-law drown in icy water because her husband spent too much time taking care of him. I remember the poison she gave her sister, before hiding the bottle in the sister's room, because she was jealous of her. I remember the way she wrapped her feet in a rug and deliberately fell down the stairs in order to lose the baby she was carrying. She was already jealous of the baby. I still remember how much this film disturbed me. But why was I thinking about this? I wasn't going to kill anyone. I was just ending a friendship that had lasted too long, in order to confront the pain of my illness alone. My reasons weren't clear. That's illness for you. Death itself is nothing. The real death is sickness, the long and painful sickness.

  Another voice encouraged me. We are all contradictory, ambivalent, irrational. I coughed, I was tired, and I wanted to cry. When she came home, Ghita had red eyes. She must have been crying. The children were sleeping. I kissed them without waking them up. I refused to let myself break down. I had to keep up my morale. The next morning I had my first chemotherapy session.

  16

  I no longer responded to Ali's letters. When he called, Ghita told him I was on a mission in Africa or Asia. His last letters expressed alarm. He didn't understand what was going on, but he thought that something had happened and wanted to understand. I maintained my silence. When he told my wife that he was very worried, that he was getting ready to come see me because he suspected serious illness (I think he meant depression), I took the phone and spoke to him, my tone cold and dry. "No," I told him, "there's no point in you coming here. I'm coming to Tangier. I just have to finish some business here, and then I'll come. You prepare the bills, and we'll settle our accounts." I hung up without allowing him to respond. I was playing my role. I felt strong. It was curious, the extent to which provoking this dispute with Ali was boosting my energy. I didn't make any effort to speak to him. It was as if he had become an enemy.

  My wife didn't understand this cruel charade. I was incapable of explaining my deepest feelings to her, or the reasons for my behavior. She did not like conflict in relationships. I made up something, saying Ali had disappointed me. She believed this immediately, adding her own examples of his supposed hypocrisy, which troubled me and made me feel worse. "Yes, now you get it. Your friend takes advantage of you. He's a profiteer, like everybody else in whom you confided without ever asking yourself why they were interested in you. People are jealous and hypocritical. Ali's no exception. Like the man who sold you your car after rigging the odometer. Like the man at the ministry in Morocco who said he was your friend, and then reported on you to the authorities before you left for Sweden. You're surrounded by people who put obstacles in your path. You had to come to Sweden to realize that. Ali might be nice enough, but his wife isn't-she's jealous of you, me, our children. It's natural she'd be jealous, since she can't have children of her own. Forget them all. Concentrate on getting your health back."

  I didn't have the strength to answer Ghita. I was trapped. "You're wrong," I wanted to say, "but you'll understand later. Please don't speak badly of others, especially not Ali. We have thirty years of friendship behind us. Please respect this, and let me work things out in my own way."

  I began to have doubts. I had set a dangerous spiral of evil in motion. I needed to keep Ghita out of it. But how? How could I convince her that this didn't concern her? I needed to turn her into a neutral bystander who would ignore my behavior toward Ali. Her hardness had always taken me aback. Beneath her angelic appearance was a woman of steel, without compassion or compromise. Where did it come from? Her childhood, most likely. She had lived with her mother in the Rif Mountains. Her father had gone to work in Germany, and he returned once every two years, in the summers. She was raised without joy or affection. But she always refused to seek help. She said she was not interested in changing her behavior or her temperament. Ghita never expressed doubts. She was always sure of herself. It was almost impossible to negotiate with her. Fortunately, she had her good points. Sincere and frank, she could not stand the social hypocrisy so widespread in Morocco. She was remarkably intelligent, and made sure our children were getting a good education. She was both soft and hard.

  17

  Six months AFTER my first chemotherapy session, Dr. Lov-gren became more optimistic, saying I could travel. He said I could go to Morocco on vacation, but I had to be careful, I could never touch anodier cigarette, and I should not even sit next to a smoker, or in a smoky room. That was going to be difficult in a country where everybody smoked.

  Whether it was an opinion I had formed before seeing it, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or bad faith, I did not like the way Ali had furnished the apartment. That was a good enough pretext for a dispute. I waited for the right moment. As always, Ali was generous and helpful. He told me I had lost weight, that I looked different. I told him it was my work, the constant travel, and disappointment in married l
ife. We had coffee together, and he confided in me, just like in the old days. He talked about his Spanish mistress, a nymphomaniac. "It's sex, it's all about sex, no feelings or emotions," he said. "She's obsessed with sex." He added: "I don't feel guilty, since she's not a threat to my marriage, or to my emotional life."

  I was suddenly jealous. I wanted something like this to tell him. In marrying Ghita, I had opted for marital fidelity, never looking at other women. It was a rational and comfortable decision. It tested my willpower. I loved Ghita. I could have had an affair with Dr. Lovgren's assistant. Briggit was available, and she made it clear to me in various ways, but I resisted. I had an impulse to tell Ali that he stereotyped women as either sexually obsessed or hysterical, but that wasn't really true of him. I did not want to pursue this discussion. I needed to set the stage for our forthcoming conflict. I asked him what he thought of Mortal Sin. He was astounded. It was overdone, he said. The screenplay was good, and so was the acting, but it was extreme. This wasn't jealousy; this was pathological. I asked what he thought about substituting a friendship between two men for the relationship between husband and wife. He had no idea what I was getting at. "There's no room for jealousy in a friendship," he said. "Friendship is pure; it's not based on sexual or material interest." He added: "You know, since you moved to Sweden, your attitude has changed. Has there ever been jealousy between us? I don't think so. We're friends because we share certain values and interests. We help each other, we have faced ordeals together, we know we can count on each other, there are no issues with women or money between us. What are you getting at, Mamed?"

  I could have launched into the argument right then and there, but I was a coward. I looked at him with tears in my eyes. I wanted to cry for myself, my plight, the things I was setting in motion. I bowed my head to avoid showing my feelings. I backed out of the dinner he had prepared for us that night. I said it was fatigue and malaise. Ali offered to come and keep me company. I discouraged him, and promised we would see each other the next day.

  Ghita told me again that Ali's wife was jealous. "I don't like the way she looks at our children. She can't stand the idea of not having any of her own, even if Nabil is so cute," she said. "You don't think so? You think I'm wrong? You should trust my intuition. This friend of yours, the one you're always putting on a pedestal…" I told her to stop. I would not allow her to judge thirty years of friendship. It was not her problem. She needed to show some respect.

  Ghita's comments upset me and I couldn't sleep. I put off the confrontation with Ali. I don't know why, but I wanted to let Ramon know what was going on. I called him, and we talked for a long time. He listened without saying anything.

  When we got back to Stockholm, I slept for two days straight. The fatigue, the grief, the sorrow, the feeling of having made an irreparable mistake, all that in the midst of my illness. I was completely confused. Everything was mixed up-good and evil, goodwill and guilt, the stench of jealousy, and the genuine desire to spare my friend my anguish. The certainty of approaching "the dark void," as my grandfather called it, preoccupied me night and day. I became obsessed with the damp ground in which my body would lie forever. Everything brought me back to this devastating thought.

  I received several letters from Ali. I forced myself to answer them brusquely, without emotion. I turned this page of my life painfully, and at the same time wondered whether it had been a good idea. To calm my nerves, I drafted my posthumous letter to Ali.

  III Ramon

  THREE YEARS LATER

  A long-standing witness to this friendship, I found myself involved in its dissolution. I refused to pass judgment on this sad affair. Mamed told me his version of the story. Ali did the same. I understood that it was not simply a question of differing points of view.

  Ravaged by illness, told by the doctors that his condition was terminal, Mamed decided to return to his country to die. He called me the day before he arrived, and asked me not to tell anyone. I met him and his wife and children at the airport. His withered face was stark testimony to the advanced disease. They moved into Mamed's parents' old house. He slept in his mothers bed, and stopped taking the medicine Dr. Lovgren had said was useless at this point. He closed his eyes and waited for death to take him. In Morocco, we say that you can see death in a person's eyes forty days before it comes. Ghita was distraught, but she managed to appear strong. She told her children Swedish fairy tales to prepare them for the loss and void ahead. I went to see Mamed twice a day. I told Ghita I would do the shopping and take care of the children.

  As soon as Mamed learned that his case was hopeless, he had a passionate desire to leave Sweden in order to die in the family home. He believed Moroccan soil was better suited to the dead than the glacial soil of Scandinavia. He no longer had the energy to compare the two countries, to criticize everything that didn't work in Morocco. He wanted to stand once more on the soil of the country he carried in his heart.

  His parents' house was in a state of terrible disrepair. His father lived there alone, surrounded by his history books and an address book in which many of the names had been crossed out. An old peasant woman came to clean once in a while. The old man said nothing, waiting for the end of his days with the faith of a good Muslim who had already put his life in Allah's hands. He forgot to take his medicine, convinced that everything was already determined in heaven, and that after a lifetime of reading, now it was time for prayer.

  Seeing his son was a shock. He was confronted with a man who looked as old as he was. He wept silently, citing a verse of the Koran that says everything happens according to Allah's will. Despite their suffering, different in intensity, father and son felt a need to communicate. I knew Mamed did not have a religious bone in his body. When he was fifteen, he would sneak out of the house to eat during Ramadan, either at Ali's house or mine. He did believe in some kind of higher spirituality, and he liked Islamic mystic poetry, especially by Sufi Ibn Arabi. I stayed there, trying to make myself scarce, witnessing this final coming together of father and son. When I got up to leave, Mamed signaled me to stay.

  Mamed's father believed that the mystics made the divine spirit into an idol, which some even dared confuse with Allah. Mamed did not contradict him, and enjoyed their conversations. They realized that they had rarely had the opportunity to talk to each other. "How are you, my son?" his father asked. "I don't mean your health, which is in Allah's hands, but in general. How was life in Sweden? You know, I wanted to visit you there. I used to dream about Scandinavia. For me, it represented honesty, social justice, democracy. But maybe I'm wrong. Some people hold up Britain as an example, but a country that colonized other countries can never be an example for others. You know, my son, I was tempted to get involved in politics when Morocco became independent, but I quickly realized we weren't ready for democracy. Not that we didn't deserve it, but we needed to be taught what democracy is. We had to learn to live together. Democracy is not simply a question of putting your ballot in a ballot box. It takes time. It's a culture that needs to be learned.

  "How are things with your wife?" he went on. "No problems, I hope? Well, everybody has them, of course. I can tell you want to rest now. If you don't mind, I'll read some verses from the Koran so you'll sleep peacefully. Afterward, we can listen to some music. I know you like Mozart, don't you? Mozart couldn't have been Moroccan. The proof is that we have no one of his caliber."

  He sat on the edge of his son's bed, watching him and reading the Koran. Then he prayed silently. Mamed fell asleep, forgetting the music. I prayed, too.

  Mamed slept badly, thrashing around as if fighting demons in a nightmare. He was struggling against death, which was fast approaching him with open arms.

  Ghita divided her time between her husband and her children. Most of the time, she had to leave the children with a cousin who ran a private school. She answered the telephone, and politely refused most visitors. "Mamed is tired. As soon as he feels better, he'll come to visit you." When Ali called, Ghita pause
d, hesitated, looked at me, then went and whispered in her husband's ear. Then she spoke into the phone: "I'm sorry, Ali," she said. "He doesn't want to see anyone. It's best to respect his wishes. If he saw you, it might make him worse. Good-bye." She looked at me again, as if to make me an accomplice. I lowered my eyes, as if I hadn't understood what she had said.

  I imagined Ali, tears in his eyes, a look of defeat on his face, despair in his heart. He must have been thinking: "But this is when he needs me. This is the most important moment in our friendship, whatever differences and misunderstandings we've had. I have to see him. I must tell him that my love is sincere, pure, even if he was mistaken about me, even if his wife did everything in her power to separate us. At the same time, I know him. When he's sick, he doesn't want anyone to see him. I remember when he got sick in the disciplinary camp, he asked me to turn out the light, so people couldn't see his tired face, wracked with fever. Today, it's much more serious. If he came home to Morocco, it's because there is no more hope. I absolutely must see him, unless… maybe it's better this way. Perhaps he wants me to preserve the image of a lively, happy Mamed, at peace with himself. Or maybe he's angry with me. But why? Because I will outlive him? Could it be that simple? No, Mamed isn't like that. I can't believe it."

  I did not find it hard to put myself in Ali's place, to imagine what he must have felt. I saw him struggling with the suspicions running through his mind, questioning himself. Something had happened, but what? He admitted that he searched constantly for the root of the misunderstanding: a careless word, an inappropriate gesture, a joke in poor taste, a lack of attention, some failure on his part. He continually replayed the last few years of their relationship. There had been no obvious drama, mishap, or misunderstanding. Their friendship had been open and transparent. They told each other everything, confided their secrets in each other. So why this harsh about-face? I think they did not have the same perception of things, that clear divergences existed, but they never brought them up. The story about the apartment was just a pretext. Mamed's wife could never have influenced him to that extent.