After fifteen minutes, Joujou comes back. With who? Zina. When she sees me, she runs toward me. Joujou pulls her violently, drags her to the table, and pushes her down in front of the English teacher: “Here’s your place.”
He takes a step toward me, sticking his chest out, and says in what sounds like a victory song, “That’s her place,” and then he goes back to the table dancing and stroking his hair. I run toward him. What’s my sister doing here? He pushes me toward the bar. With a roughness I wasn’t expecting. A strange, surprising fear takes hold of me. The customers are watching. Frozen in their spots and looking at him. The same despair overwhelms them. And the teacher? He seems like he has no misgivings at all. With a bowed head, playing with his glass, waiting for it to end. I don’t know what’s going on in Madame Janeau’s head at that moment. She’s taken out her small mirror, put on deep-red lipstick, and begun doing her makeup for the coming half day.
Zina’s started crying. I can’t bear Zina’s crying. I can’t stand to see her tears. It’s my fault. That’s what I think at that moment. I’m the one who pushed her to this life. Everything’s fallen apart. Everything I did for her isn’t worth a thing anymore. God alone knows how much I fought for her to live a normal life. God alone knows how much I fought so she doesn’t lack anything. I put her in school so she could have a profession. And here she is crying. The pimp grabs the teacher’s hand and puts it on her knee and tells him to try out her freshness on the spot. Why doesn’t the earth split open and swallow us all? Joujou’s relaxed. He doesn’t care what I’m thinking. He leans over Zina, grabs her by the chin, and begins nodding her head and laughing. He then sits at the table and puts his hand on her shoulder. The beer spills from the glass in his hand. No one knows how to deal with him.
Aziz gets off the stool and moves toward the table. Joujou notices him and gets up. He doesn’t stand up all the way because Aziz hits him with a single blow that throws him to the ground. No one sees it coming. It comes quickly. Only the pimp sees it as he’s falling. Then, laid out on his back, all his malice leaves him. His blood, like the blood of any pimp, flows out on the bar floor. You don’t know where it’s coming from. Abdesalam comes out from behind the bar and says to the horse bettors: “Get out of here before the police come.”
The English teacher and the horse bettors, as if they’ve come back to life, grab the pimp and drag him outside. With excessive zeal, as if they were waiting for the chance to take revenge on him.
Aziz takes Zina’s hand and leads her to the bar. He puts her on the stool. She’s happy. High on the stool. For the first time, in all her femininity, Zina’s suddenly become a woman. A young, beautiful, happy woman. With her whole life in front of her. I’m happy too. Happy for her happiness. The only thing I feel is tears coming down from my eyes.
After fifteen minutes, the horse bettors go back out to check on the pimp. He’s disappeared. They find a drop of black blood where he’d been lying.
Until now, I don’t know when the idea occurred to the pimp. Did it ferment in his mind little by little? Or did it come down in one fell swoop this morning while he was watching Zina cross the living room in her see-through shirt, nearly naked, strutting, with her bare white forearms, crossing the living room with childish indifference? Zina’s grown up. She was always beautiful. She’s grown more beautiful this morning. Her chest has filled out. I think her walking in front of him this morning, almost naked in her see-through shirt, with her breasts swaying languidly, that’s what aroused Joujou’s devilish ideas. At that moment, he didn’t say anything. It was enough for him to take a sip from his cup, set it down hard, and leave. But the idea was there. I didn’t notice it as it rang out in his head like a bell, but it was there. I go back to the bar counter. Aziz turns to Zina and asks her: “What are we doing now?”
She tells him: “Let’s play.”
Aziz gives Abdesalam two twenty-dirham bills and tells him to put a bet down on horse number seven. I’ve played the horses many times but no horse I ever bet on won. From this angle too, my luck’s twisted. But who knows? Luck might be my ally this time. The number seven might be our lucky number, mine and Zina’s.
8
Aziz
A Little after Midnight
1
LIKE A BELL THAT DOESN’T stop ringing, sores have crept over the sides of my body. I’m anxious about the catastrophe that will befall me if I fall off the slab tonight. This bell started going off in my head a while ago, with its ominous song: You’ll fall. Din din din. You won’t fall. Din din din. The path begins as usual with a round of pain attacking my body little by little until it’s a cascade. I haven’t fallen yet but my body tells me tonight it’ll fall. If I fall on the ground, I’ll spend the night there like an overturned cockroach. The ground is wet, with a thick crust of mud. When a stream of dim light comes in, I see bubbles gurgling on its surface. They appear and disappear in a persistent movement as if they’re millions of small worms turning around by themselves. Maybe that’s what they are, because they make a sound like a reptile under the ground. If my weak body falls on the ground, there’ll be no morning, as death will have come and gone, taking with it what’s left of me. That’s why you see me starting to take some precautions before illness overtakes me. I tie my hand with a rope and hang it over a nail on the wall. I tie the other end of the rope to the toe the rat bit and stretch out. I look at the ground under me. Dampness. Water. Death.
In this phase, illness isn’t connected to this foot or that anymore. It’s passed them and entered the rest of the body. The illness usually begins with a kind of simple disturbance, like any other. Because of the bite, it began early tonight as if someone was pressing on my fingers one by one. The right hand first, then the left. Afterward, my fingers stiffened. As if I had a bunch of stiff rods instead of fingers. Or as if they’d been injected with a full dose of anesthetic. From there it made its way to the other limbs. What I feel in this stage of advancing illness is what wood feels as fire eats it up. A true burning in the veins inside the chest before the blaze engulfs the rest of the body. Stiffness replaces another kind of feeling, with doubled pain. The pain becomes universal, unbroken. It lessens and then grows in an internal, secret symphony, harmonious with its role, and you suffer because you listen to it with all your senses that become increasingly clear and aware, as if the pain stimulates them. Here too any movement becomes painful and awareness of it becomes harsh to the utmost degree. In this state of mine, I have to take every precaution to avoid falling from the slab. When any movement is impossible for me, my sick body falling on the wet ground with all kinds of filth means death. I cannot fall asleep. Sleeping is falling and falling is death. It’s easy not to fall in times of waking, as in now, if you could call this being awake. Realizing exactly what’s happening to my body, to every organ in it, to every cell, but incapable of moving. My body is a pile of screaming, noxious pain. But more than this, I must not sleep.
The best position is to lie down on your back. Sleeping on your side always tempts you to turn to the other side. As for sleeping on your back, nothing compares to it. It makes you feel that you’re seeking refuge on the ground. You insist on staying there. Only the dead are buried on their sides. I’m still alive and I intend to stay alive. My hand is tied to the rope. And the rope is looped around a high nail on the wall, with the other end tied exactly to my toe. When sleep descends on me suddenly and my hand relaxes and falls, it’ll pull the rope that’ll pull my bitten toe up, doubling the pain that’ll make me scream and I’ll wake up despite myself. That’s how, in this strange balance, I’ll escape from falling.
The illness moves in the same way, and it got me used to it. It increases and increases until it becomes a burning mass. A flaming ball. Except the head. The head is submerged in another kind of pain: the sharp awareness of all the different degrees of the rising pain, like an overturned waterfall. My breathing only returns as a broken-up track of whistling. It too has its rising notes, according to the adv
ance of the night and the penetration into the thickets of the illness. All my senses are aroused, vigorous, following the least movement and the least sound. The pain’s rising now. I say at this advanced time of night, I might not fall tonight. I’m waiting to fall. That’s the bell ringing again: You’ll fall. Din din din. You won’t fall. Din din din. Dawn is still far off but we, my body and me, we’ve made it through an important part. Sometimes it seems to me I’m tumbling, then I discover it’s only my mind playing with me. Other times, I go easily into a short nap, lasting not more than two or three seconds (two or three pulses), when I see myself fall or see myself wondering if I fell. All this before the string on my right toe is pulled. I scream without knowing if it’s the string pulling my toe or if I dreamed of the string pulling my toe. Or that none of this happened. That I didn’t dream or I didn’t scream, that nothing happened. All the torture’s still in front of me. The falling. And then death. Then . . . And what is death? An eternal smell. A calm descending to the final resting place where there’s nothing. I wait for dawn to be sure of all this.
I feel like I’m dozing off. I turn slowly toward the kingdom of unconsciousness and I expect the toe to rise up to make me scream but it doesn’t rise up and I don’t scream. Din din din. You won’t fall. Din din din. You’ll fall. Sleeping is falling and falling is death. I look at the ceiling. Has the bird come back? There are eyes looking out. Many eyes and mouths laughing. Faces changing shape, with long fingers piercing the holes and coming down and down. Then going back up and up. Nothing’s clear and the faces mock my fear.
I lie on my back, as if I’m bound to the cement basin by a thick rope so I don’t fall. Here cooks used to wash the dishes of the local governor without one of them knowing what it meant to fall. Or maybe they washed dead men in it.
The faces mock my fear. And my imaginary rope and the string attached to my toe. They mock my disgraceful trick as I threaten them with my tied toes. I’m not joking. It’s a matter of life or death. But they keep laughing and mocking. I avert my face. I see a plastic can on the wet ground and thirst overwhelms me. The desire for water becomes so oppressive that I want to fall to get closer to the water. The water’s there, underneath, in the plastic can, two liters at least. Oh, the day’s passed to its last drop and my share of water hasn’t run out? Do I break the rope and move to the edge? There are big rats trying to turn the can over so they can drink too. They pretend they’re gnawing so I can see their fangs. They’re used to waiting for me to fall, looking at me with red eyes and waiting for me to fall so they can bite my other foot. Then the ground shakes and turns me around as it does for a drunk, as I make a conscious effort to say that I’m finally falling.
2—January 1972
I’m sitting in the tower watching him at the door of the storehouse. His helmet under his arm. He’s getting ready to get into the plane with everything he needs. He seems happy. Like anyone getting ready to fly in the sky. I watch the plane too—it’s on the ground, about twenty meters away. As if it’s waiting for him. I think: This plane knows me. We traveled together in the great sky. We danced above Kénitra as it was sleeping and then as it was waking. A plane with one seat. Green like the color of olives. Its front like the head of a hawk with its fine beak and two windows like wide eyes. It’s my friend Captain Hammouda, who’s standing at the storehouse door, stealing a glance at the tower, hesitating. Is he going to move toward the plane or not? Finally he moves. He circles around it. He looks at it, passing his hand over its surface, as if he’s its new owner. Now and then he looks toward the observation tower where I’m sitting watching him. I hesitate too. Should I go down or not? In the end I go down. I go down and approach the plane. Hammouda has backtracked and disappeared into the storehouse. I follow him. The smell of kerosene and gas surprises me. The smell of burning oil. The smell of a world I know. A smell inhabiting my body. Igniting my blood. It’s as if I went in to renew my connection with it and to fill my lungs with its scent. My fingers and my mind are on fire and every part in my body wants to pounce on this piece or that. Captain Hammouda is in his green uniform as if he’s trying to hide between the piles of instruments and engine parts being repaired, but he doesn’t succeed. His height doesn’t help him disappear. I move behind him to surprise him. Confused, he says he’s looking for his glasses. He doesn’t mention where he put them. He tries to hide his confusion, or maybe he wants to apologize because he’ll fly the plane I was flying. Maybe he wants to apologize but his tongue isn’t helping him. I pretend I’m helping him look for his glasses. I ask him jokingly if he can fly without them. He doesn’t respond. We look for a while. I hide behind the instruments. I leave the storehouse without him noticing me. Without him turning toward me. He knows I’ve left but he doesn’t want to turn so he doesn’t have to acknowledge it. I go back to the observation tower and the smell of burning oil and gasoline follows me, fills my head and my lungs, fills my blood. I watch the door of the storehouse again and wait for Hammouda to come out. I don’t see him. I expect him to come out at any moment. I wonder what he’s doing in there and what’s going on in his head.
The ringing of the plane’s engine fills my head even when I’m far from the airbase. When I leave the base, I’m still there really. I love planes and the sound of their engines. The noise fills my head day and night. By day I fly and by night I dream I’m the pilot and the plane. But this isn’t what the colonel, the head of the airbase, thinks. My happiest times are when I find myself flying in the sky. But yesterday the colonel told me: “Aziz, forget the plane. Forget the sky. The ground is better for you.”
I feel like dust is coming down on my face and covering my mind. The colonel, the person responsible for the airbase, is sitting behind his desk as I stand before him and listen to him and tell myself that, except for flying, I’m not good at anything. This is my profession. I only learned this one thing. Flying is my life. Since I came to the airbase seven months ago, I haven’t been doing anything but this. I fly. When I don’t fly, I’m in the storehouse, poring over the engine, examining its coils. The heat on the plane’s surface scorches my face and I remember we’ve spent a lot of time in the sky, the plane and I. I give it a rest. I circle around it and wait for its engine to rest, not knowing, as time passes, if it’s resting or not. Then I go up to it and see it’s still emitting fumes and I tell it to calm down. I say I have to leave but I don’t leave. I get up on the machine, clean it, and rub it bit by bit so it revives and its calmness and liveliness return to it. Its great love is the sky. I say I have to leave but I don’t leave. I sit next to it, asking if it liked how we spent the day.
My friends make fun of me at the airbase: “What’re you doing, Aziz? You’re good at taking off but not at landing?”
It’s before lunch and we’re in the snack bar drinking afternoon beer and all of a sudden Captain Hammouda lets out a strange chuckle. Captain Hammouda’s my friend and he likes talking about the same thing: “One day, Aziz, you’ll fly off and you won’t come back.”
Sometimes the colonel intervenes too, joking, I think he’s joking, when he asks me in front of the other pilots: “Didn’t you learn how to land in school?”
But yesterday, when he called me into his office, he wasn’t joking. He sat in his usual stern way, moving his papers, and not looking at me. It was hard to breathe, as if dust were blocking my nose and mouth. What was he doing? He was moving his papers between his fingers and pointing at the observation tower. As if he were telling me that’s my place starting tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes quickly. Bringing with it disappointment. Captain Hammouda seems confused, standing in front of the storehouse door holding his helmet, moving one foot forward and holding back the other. Captain Hammouda isn’t laughing as he pretends to look for his glasses. He doesn’t want to embarrass me.
What are they doing now in the snack bar, all of them, including the colonel? I sit in the tower now, watching it. The plane I spent seventy-six hours on looks like an orphan on the groun
d without me. Without a friend. Without a captain. Without Aziz. Its new captain has disappeared into the storehouse looking for glasses that don’t exist. From there, maybe he’s watching me. As I’m watching him. I pretend I’m not watching him. Like he’s pretending. Other planes took off a while ago but my plane was left waiting for the captain who’ll give it back its glow. And I stayed behind, in the tower. I’m not doing anything. I don’t touch any of the buttons. I watch the door of the storehouse and wait for Hammouda to come out in his green uniform with his helmet under his arm to take my place.
“It’s forbidden for you to fly, said the colonel, “Because you don’t know how to land. In the whole world, is there a captain who isn’t good at landing?”
I do sometimes forget myself. The heights make me dizzy. I get lost in a delicious dream. The sound of the radio comes to me: “Aziz, come down.” But I don’t hear it. The unconfined space intoxicates me. Close to the sun, in a strange way, as if it rose for me alone. Sometimes I have the mountains under me on one side and the forests on the other, sometimes the vast expanse of the sea. But what takes me completely is the view of the river. When I cross the city, I see it: countryside in every direction and the river moving freely in it like a gigantic snake. I follow its zigzags. I twist where it twists. Sometimes it disappears behind a mountain so I bide my time. I give it enough time to disappear. To surprise it again. We both love this game. The river and me. Then I go up and up, to where it’s small, a trickle of water embracing the hip of the mountain.
3
In front of the plane’s yoke, I float again, I float in a calmness like the intoxication of the eternal. All the worries of the day, those that turn hair white without you noticing it and make your veins dry out, all of them are gone. Because of the pure oxygen filling my lungs. The earth stays large underneath. However far away, it stays large. But it doesn’t fill me with delight. Being hidden in the heights is what obsesses me, nourishes me, nurses me. But not in the way a mother nurses her baby. I’m nourished from its hidden milk as I play. My two hands, which aren’t good at anything on the ground, find here, high above, their hidden skill. I notice, and then realize that what used to terrify me doesn’t anymore. It stopped. My body, things and their shadows don’t terrify it. There are no shadows here. Nothing follows it. Or subdues it. Because it’s outside my will. I hear it neigh. I see it tremble like a foal on the farm. I can’t do anything to it. I can’t control it if it occurs to it to pretend to be stupid. Its acrobatics, I can’t control them. I can’t keep it from flying without stopping. Will it hear me if I tell it to stop flying because the colonel asks me to? Will it hear the radio as it tells Aziz to come down? Where’s Aziz? There’s no trace of him on the ground. His body isn’t his anymore. He can even become a bird, changing his clothes if he wanted. And I only hope for this. My body wants to go all the way to the small village where I was born. Why don’t we take a little peek to see if my father’s come back, pushing his ram in front of him? And I know my body won’t wait for me to respond because it’ll have changed directions, going up, always up. Toward the sun.
A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me Page 7