Men Don't Cry

by Faïza Guène

  I’d forgotten just how long they went on, the intros to those raï songs. Miloud was invincible when it came to raï. He could have listened to it non-stop, day and night. Given half a chance, he’d have hooked himself up to a drip: raï music direct into his blood stream.

  On the day Cheb Hasni was murdered, 18 years ago, Miloud scarifed himself. He also wept for weeks on end and lost loads of weight. Now, whenever he listened to the Cheb’s music, he whispered ‘Allah y rahmou’ before pressing play.

  After an intro so long you could be forgiven for forgetting there was a singer involved, I finally recognised the song Miloud was playing. It was a hit by Cheb El Hindi: Ndiha gawriya.

  The song tells the story of a young man who decides to recover from his disappointment in love by falling for a ‘Frenchie’ and running away with her. It made a splash in the 90’s. Miloud is a purist, specialising in old-skool raï.

  ‘D’you remember?’

  ‘You bet! You used to listen to it on a loop, while chain-smoking.’

  ‘This song is my life! I even listened to it in prison!’

  For Miloud, France was a dream.

  As a boy, he could never understand why Mina cried at the end of the holidays when it was time to fly back to Nice.

  ‘In your shoes, I’d be crying about coming here at the beginning of July! You don’t know how lucky you are!’

  ‘Nor do you!’ Mina would sniff.

  ‘So anyway, how’s your father?’

  ‘He’s doing well, hamdoullah.’

  ‘It’s so sad. When I found out what happened to him, it broke my heart! He was so active, right? Always fixing things, always on the move.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I pray for his recovery, insha’Allah.

  ‘Thanks, Miloud.’

  I had a flashback to the day Miloud stole 1000 dinars from Big Baba’s toolbag. He must have been 13 or 14 at the time, and already a seasoned seducer. He used the money to invite girls to an ice-cream parlour called La Baie d’Alger. I snitched on him to my uncle, who reacted by hurling a screwdriver at Miloud’s head and cracking his skull. ‘Forget the money!’ my mother kept screaming. ‘Don’t hurt him! Meskine!’ Afterwards, she poured coffee powder on the wound. According to her, it would help it scar and heal over.

  I don’t know why I suddenly recalled that incident. I found myself staring at the back of Miloud’s head, wondering if the scar was still there, but it was impossible to see anything with all that hair gel.

  The automatic garage door opened slowly, as Miloud turned up the volume on the CD player.

  ‘Normally, I pump up the music louder – Hasni at top volume to piss them off! But it’s not worth it now. No one’s around. They’ve all split for the Côte d’Azur.’

  Even if I sold all my bodily organs, it occurred to me while I was admiring the outside of the Haussmann block, I couldn’t pay the rent on a single square metre here.

  I had never seen such a vast apartment, let alone one decorated with so much taste. There were gigantic paintings hanging from the walls. The parquet floor had been polished until it was spotless and its centrepiece was a stunning Persian carpet. My mother would have been beside herself.

  I scanned the living room from top to bottom; not a hint of a plastic flower anywhere.

  There was lacquered furniture, an enormous dining table, a chandelier and a grand piano. Black and so shiny that I could see my reflection in it.

  ‘That’s Liliane for you. She bought this piano, but she doesn’t know how to play.’

  To own a piano like that, without playing it, seemed the height of luxury. I was keen to find out more about this Liliane. But I was even more keen to discover why my cousin Miloud could walk all over her Persian carpet.

  I could see he was amused by my reactions and relishing the suspense. He couldn’t wait for me to interrogate him, and I was about to do so when a tall thin man appeared in the room.

  ‘Good day, messieurs.’

  Sporting a trim moustache and a white waistcoat, he looked like a tap-dancer straight out of a black-and-white movie.

  He reminded me of the expression ‘as straight as a ramrod’.

  ‘Hey, Mario! Wassup, chouïa?’

  Miloud turned to me and winked. ‘This is Mario, our butler!’

  Despite Miloud’s enthusiastic introduction, Mario maintained the same frozen expression he had adopted since entering the room.

  ‘Lunch is serrrved. If you would care to rrrelocate to the table.’

  Upon delivering his lines, complete with rolled r’s, Mario left much as he had entered. Stiff as a poker.

  ‘He’s Italian. Liliane brought him over from Milan. He’s somethin’ else, but he’s a nice enough guy. Right, I’m starving. Come on, let’s eat!’

  ‘Miloud? When are you going to explain this mix-up?’

  ‘There’s no mix-up, just a leg-up, cuz!’

  On the menu: cushion of veal, sautéd vegetables and potato purée à l’ancienne.

  I was expecting a television crew to rush in at any moment, clapping. Miloud would be cackling like a madman, showing me where the camera was hidden. He’d have everyone in tears of laughter. And we’d watch ourselves on primetime TV the following Saturday evening.

  While my cousin and I were eating lunch, Mario stood against the wall, staring into thin air. I was reminded of school punishments. It made me feel uncomfortable. I hardly dared to eat. I even started worrying: what if poor Mario was hungry? Nobody should be that thin.

  Miloud, on the other hand, felt at home. He was mopping up the gravy with big chunks of bread and chewing noisily.

  I stared at the mouldings on the ceiling as I sank my fork slowly into the veal.

  ‘Don’t you like it, cuz?’

  ‘No, I do, I do. It’s really good!’

  ‘Well then, eat! Plus it’s halal! I sent Mario to the other side of Paris to find a Muslim butcher! Specially for you!’

  I tried not to keep glancing over at that poor, skinny butler with just the one facial expression.

  ‘I’m gonna start at the beginning, otherwise you won’t understand a thing! My life’s like a film, you get me? You know I had a few problems cos of a girl in Chéraga, and I went to prison? So, no suprises, that story did the rounds of Algiers! A lot of the family turned their backs on me. The girl made the whole thing up! She did it out of revenge! Because I didn’t want to marry her! You get me? I’m the innocent party in this story! But you know how it is…. Her dad’s brother’s a sentencing judge in Algiers, so I stood no chance of being cleared. As for my old man, the chibani’s just a poor bus driver. I was lucky to even find a lawyer who’d take on my case. Over there, if you have nothing, you are nothing. Hamdoullah, I got a reduced sentence. The day I was let out, my poor mum cooked my favourite dish of grilled peppers.

  ‘After all that, I had to start again from zero. If you could start from below zero, Mourad, that’s what I’d have done…. From the basement.’

  The trouble is, nobody ever starts again from zero. Not even the Arabs, who invented it, as Big Baba would say.

  ‘I’m telling you, Mourad, my dad barely spoke to me after that. He was ashamed to look me in the eye, and that’s what hurt the most! I could read the shame on his forehead, cuz. It’s one thing for the law to get it wrong, yeah, but it totally sucks when your own family thinks you’re guilty.

  ‘One day, there I was with some friends on the terrace of a cafeteria. We’d ordered two coffees, between the five of us.

  ‘Five unemployed guys. You know that unemployment rate you see in the newspapers? Well, that was us! All five of us representing the stat, ‘70 percent under the age of 30’.

  ‘I remember that day so clearly, Mourad! One of my friends, Akli, had these Gucci flip-flops, or at least that’s what he said they were – he made out they were g-e-n-u-i-n-e Guccis sent by his cousin from Italy! Yeah, sure. Why would Gucci bother making foam flip-flops? So anyway…’

  Miloud had taken out a ci
garette, and Mario, gliding over the parquet with quick, tiny steps, produced a lighter under my cousin’s nose. This butler walked like a geisha.

  After inhaling a great big puff of cancer, Miloud carried on.

  ‘We spent the afternoon chatting up skirts on rue Didouche. No luck, cuz. We didn’t have a clue. Looking back, we were animals, five bellowing calfs. It was hot, that day. My hair gel was melting down my forehead. We only had 100 dinars left in our pockets. And there was this fly, right, kept buzzing around me. Bugging me so bad, cuz. I kept flicking it away, and it kept coming back, landing on my arms, on my cheek, buzzing around my head. It wouldn’t let me go. I even got to wondering; is this a djinn in a fly’s body? So I borrowed one of Akli’s flip-flops and hit it with a foam sole. Poor thing nose-dived straight into the coffee, like a plane in freefall. I watched it trembling for a few seconds, beating its wings, struggling. It drowned in the end. But it still kept spinning round in the tepid coffee. I mean, it was excruciating to watch, right? So that got me thinking, was I going to end up like that, destined to suffer, to drown after struggling to live a little?’

  Miloud kept going with his story for hours. He told me about the racket to obtain a student visa. His arrival in Paris. Dropping out of university. How he’d been put up by a Tunisian garage mechanic. His nights at a club in the banlieue called Le Saphir Bleu. The network he’d built up over three years. And finally, the swimming pool at Auteuil. He wasn’t wrong when he said his life’s a film. By faking his CV, and with the help of a friend, he got taken on as a swimming instructor. He passed himself off as Italian, under the assumed name of ‘Tino’.

  ‘Liliane caught on that I was Arab and I think that’s what attracted her to me.’

  Then again, between a Milanese butler and a waster from Bab el Oued, she must have quickly spotted the difference.

  ‘I was already at the pool, right? So I just had to go fishing! And there were some big fish about, believe me, cuz, with all those ancient floating millionairesses!’

  Liliane belonged to the haute bourgeoisie, and to prove it she had a ‘de’ at the beginning of her surname, bank accounts in Switzerland, a property portfolio and a sprinkling of Judeo-Christian values. She was the daughter of a famous French jeweller. She had married an ambassador and followed him around the world, going along with his lifestyle and infidelities. Finally, at 50, she had ditched him in Vietnam.

  Her only son, Edouard, lived in New York. It saddened her that she saw him so little. He availed himself of her maternal love through bank transfers.

  I couldn’t not put the question to Miloud: ‘Do you love Liliane?’

  He smiled slyly. ‘I like her a lot.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘It’s a good start.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She went for coffee with a girlfriend of hers – a journalist or something.’

  I was reflecting on how, even though this whole story was kind of far-fetched, it wasn’t so surprising, knowing Miloud.

  I might even end up getting used to the butler, the silverware, the piano, the king-size bed in the guestroom, the shower with the water massage jet, the gastronomic menus and the incredible view of the Eiffel Tower.

  The Phone-call

  I had never enjoyed Sundays so much before.

  An early riser, Liliane always began by reading the weekend papers. Then, chilled after her half of Xanax, she would join us at the breakfast table where she gave us a recap of what was going on in the world. My cousin liked to down his coffee while stroking his girlfriend’s thigh, and I would tuck into a delicious rhubarb brioche. It gave me a warm glow.

  On this particular Sunday, after our current affairs, Liliane moved on, once again, to seeking Miloud’s opinion about the face-lift she was contemplating. And, once again, his answer came back: ‘No way are you tweaking your face!’

  ‘It’ll be very subtle. My friend Aude, you know, Charles’s wife…? Well she’s recommended a surgeon. I can at least meet with him, just to see…’

  ‘No, Liliane. I’ve said no. Your wrinkles and saggy bits are all part of your beauty.’

  ‘Thanks for the compliment.’

  Liliane bit her lip and looked upset.

  Or, she did at first.

  Then she gazed over at Miloud and kissed him passionately on the lips.

  There was something sleazy about their relationship. She enjoyed him dominating her. He had no shame. They both loved people noticing them. I was beginning to get used to it. I didn’t ask any questions when they disappeared late at night, mid-week, setting off on foot with a mysterious leather bag.

  ‘What about your father, Mourad? How’s he doing?’

  Liliane put the question to me after breakfast, just as I was about to leave the table.

  The truth of the matter was that the physios kept saying to us, ‘He’s stagnating, he’s depressed, he’s lost the will to get better….’ But what I told Liliane was, ‘He’s going from strength to strength!’

  ‘That’s great news!’ she smiled. ‘You know, there’s no rush for you to find an apartment-share!’

  ‘Consider this your home!’ added Miloud, who was slumped on his chair with an over-full belly.

  My cousin considered it to be his home, that much was sure. He had probably felt at home from the first moment he set foot inside the apartment.

  On the telephone, Mina couldn’t believe her ears.

  ‘What a leech! It’s disgusting to take advantage of people’s weaknesses!’

  ‘Look, she doesn’t seem too unhappy.’

  ‘He’s a free-loader! As I’ve always said!’

  ‘I’m telling you, Mina, he’s means well.’

  ‘Yeah, right.… Watch out, Mourad. Don’t follow him blindly. Don’t trust him. And keep looking for somewhere else to live. His decrepit millionairess will grow weary of him one of these days and kick him out. She’ll find some other kid who’s fresh off the boat, and you’ll be in a fix because of that parasite.’

  ‘Don’t worry!’

  ‘Anyway, it’s not long before the start of term. Make sure you get plenty of rest.’

  ‘Are the children doing well?’

  ‘Yes, very well. Hamdoullah.’

  ‘What about Maman?’

  ‘Oh, you know what she’s like. Same as usual. Try to call her more often, please. Every evening, she sobs and kisses your photo. It’s creepy.’

  ‘I’ll call her right away. Promise!’

  ‘Insha’Allah.’

  ‘And Big Baba?’

  ‘The same. Yesterday, he threw a tantrum at the nurses who wanted to help him put on his made-to-measure orthopaedic shoes. You know what he shouted? ‘I’m not wearing boots for cripples!’ So Maman just keeps taking couscous to the care team every Friday. She’s convinced it’s all thanks to her food that they’re looking after Papa properly. I’m not joking, he’s becoming unbearable!’

  Life was carrying on without me. I’d have missed Nice even more if it hadn’t been for those delicious rhubarb brioches. And the incredible library. Some of the novels were even signed by the authors. Liliane owned the finest collection of books I’d ever seen. It was almost impossible for me to be bored.

  My telephone didn’t ring much. So when I felt it vibrating in my jeans pocket, I immediately thought of her.

  ‘Hallo? Mourad?’

  And yes, it was Dounia. With her slightly husky voice.

  Her photo on the front page of Nice Matin flashed up again. Her short hair. Her smoky eyes.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Dounia…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Thanks for calling me back…. You okay?’

  ‘I’m good, and you?’

  ‘Fine, thanks…’

  ‘It’s weird hearing you like this. I mean… You sound like a man now.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s been a while, I guess…’

  The last time I’d spoken to Dounia, my voice hadn’t f
inished breaking. Like all 16-year-old boys, I was a hybrid: part-child, part-monkey.

  ‘It’s weird for me too, hearing you. I don’t know where to start, Dounia.’

  ‘Look, no one’s finding this easy, but let’s give it a try. It was tough calling you back too, you know. What matters is we’re talking now…’

  ‘I’m sorry. I swear, I wouldn’t choose to call you in these circumstances. I wish things were different, but here goes. Papa had a stroke a few weeks back and he’s in hospital.’

  ‘… You’re kidding?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shit. Fuck, I wasn’t expecting that. Is it serious? What’s the damage?’

  Her voice quavered, betraying sadness, fear and guilt… A Molotov cocktail of emotions.

  ‘So his right side is paralysed and he has trouble with his memory.’

  ‘But he can still recognise you?’

  ‘Yes, he recognises us.’

  ‘Thank goodness.… I’m grateful to you for letting me know, Mourad.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  A long silence followed; heavy, grey and muffled as a mid-afternoon cloud. The kind of cloud that makes you wonder: ‘What are we in for? A sunny spell or a monster thunderstorm?’

  ‘Look, the thing is, he said he wanted to see you.’

  ‘… Seriously?’

  ‘Yes, promise.’

  ‘Papa? He asked to see me? It was his idea?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I find that very surprising.’

  ‘I’m telling you it was his idea.’

  If I’d been in Dounia’s shoes, I’d have been equally sceptical. Knowing Big Baba, that is. It can be as hard to tease an idea out of his head as it is to get the karakul off it.

  ‘This is bonkers. I don’t understand. Why didn’t you look me up before? You had to wait until something serious happened. It’s so stupid for words. Can you imagine if he hadn’t made it…?’