A Palace in the Old Village (7 page)

That Sunday there was hardly any line in front of Suzy’s small apartment. A bit fat, as vulgar as they come, Suzy seemed to have made an effort to exaggerate her appearance, as if that were part of whoring, but she was so nice, so human, that everyone overlooked her heavily rouged cheeks, her nauseating perfume, and the alcohol.
Her eyes were never still but always vacant; she was there and elsewhere. She knew her work was unusual, and she too was looking forward to retirement because she’d had it with spreading her legs and squeezing
immigrant
balls. But she liked the men, even found their
shyness
and awkwardness touching, she said.

Mohammed’s guide explained the deal precisely. You go in, you smile at her (she likes men who smile), and you put your hundred francs in a bowl on the night table. There are licorice and mint candies in the bowl—the mint’s my favorite—to make your breath sweet, so you take one, and you also take a very thin sheath called a rubber that protects you from diseases and other
complications
; then you lie down on the bed and let her get to work: she’s quick, expert, efficient, and she has a
fantastic
technique to clean out your balls in a few minutes. You’ll see—you’ll feel a lot better. If you don’t know how to put on the rubber, she’ll take care of it, don’t worry, and when it’s over, hey, you’ll thank your pal!

The fog thickened; Mohammed hung his head, trying to chase away those images from so long ago. Still, he did remember that Suzy had been very kind to him. He’d never gone back, though.

He associated this memory with a more unpleasant one, a humiliating experience. The medical officer at the factory, Dr. Garcia, had been blunt with him when he’d reached fifty: Mohammed, you get up often at night to take a leak? Then you must have prostate problems. We’ll have to have a look at that.

At the appointment, the doctor told him to remove his trousers and underpants and to bend over as if he
were praying. Mohammed just stood there, shaking his head. Growing impatient, the doctor pretended to
suddenly
understand, then said, I know, it isn’t easy,
embarrassment
and shame,
hchouma
. I know all about it. But I must examine you, and I can’t do it long-distance. Just trust me: it takes thirty seconds, then it’s over, doesn’t even hurt. Mohammed would have liked to tell him that it wasn’t a question of physical pain, no, but that he’d never shown his rear end to anyone. After a moment, Mohammed closed his eyes, quickly pulled down his trousers and underpants, and bent over. The doctor asked him to bend a little more. Raging inside,
Mohammed
did so. The doctor performed a rectal exam. Fine, your prostate’s a normal size for your age, but we’ll have to keep an eye on it, right, Mohammed? Let’s have you back here in one year.

When he left, Mohammed walked along staring at the ground. He was angry at himself and sorry he hadn’t asked Dr. Garcia to anaesthetise him for the exam. And he didn’t like the doctor telling him to bend over as if he were praying. He couldn’t bear it that a finger had probed his anus. He never mentioned the visit to anyone and from then on ignored his prostate completely.

TIME.
He couldn’t have cared less about time. It was an enemy, the one that would be the first to strip him naked before himself and his family. He compared it to a long rope that doesn’t always hold. A rope that frays, slips its knots, dangling at the end of a pole. A shroud, but its whiteness is mere illusion. Time could only be too long, painful, without light, without joy, a line that rises only to fall, air full of dust. Time had several faces; it was a traitor that would break him gently, then finish him off the way it had his pal Brahim.

Mohammed didn’t know how to garden or to tackle projects around the house, and as for travelling, the only trips he’d ever taken, besides the pilgrimage to Mecca, were the ones home from France to his village in
southern
Morocco. As he liked to say, he drove on and on, covering the 2,882 kilometres within forty-eight hours. He ate up time without speeding. He wanted to be faster and stronger than his opponent. It was a performance, a challenge: he’d get the idea into his head that he was going to beat time, poke holes in it, look it in the face and have a good laugh—and he was a man who never laughed anymore. He liked the fatigue after the drive, a deep, lovely fatigue after a job well done, because once back home, after triumphing over time, he paid no more
attention to it. He felt safe, completely safe. Nothing
disturbed
him, no one bothered him.

He’d sleep through the next day and night. His little prostate problem would interrupt his rest two or three times and, rising to pee, he’d remember Dr. Garcia and that humiliating examination. Mohammed couldn’t understand why the doctor had inserted a finger into his anus to check his prostate. Why doesn’t he take an X-ray? With that, you see everything. That Garcia must be a pervert. The shame! He should just forget the whole thing. Mohammed thought of Khalid, his cousin’s son, who left one day with a Canadian tourist. Rumor had it that he was practically a girl and hid from people because they saw him as abnormal. Boys used to taunt him; some had supposedly even abused him behind the little mountain. Poor Khalid disappeared and hadn’t been heard from since. Living with a man, people said. Absolute disgrace! His parents preferred to claim that he was ill and receiving treatment in America. The fact that he sent them money orders put them on the spot. One day his father had yelled, I haven’t any son! Khalid is not my son! He’s a bastard I tried to adopt, but Islam is right—adoption is forbidden, and I’ve been punished!

Each voyage home was an event in the village. Once there, Mohammed always forgot how he hated
cumbersome
luggage. He loved that atmosphere, that joy in the faces of children eager for presents; he loved those reunions with the old folks, with the members of a huge family who gazed at him, their eyes brimming with envy. The family was the tribe. From the outside, it
seemed like an invading, clinging horde. The doors of the houses didn’t close, and even if they’d been bolted shut, the tribe would have come in through the windows or down from the roof terrace, respecting no limits, for the tribe was at home anywhere in the village. Not only did everyone know everyone else, but they meddled in one another’s affairs. It was a big family organised in an archaic manner, governed by traditions and
superstitions
. There was nothing Mohammed could do about that; it was in their blood: you can’t escape your roots. He wasn’t even bothered when certain members of the tribe “misbehaved.” His nephew had built a house on some of Mohammed’s land, but he didn’t reclaim it; that’s what family was. When his eldest son, Mourad, protested, Mohammed ended the matter by reminding him that family is sacred and one doesn’t quarrel over a scrap of land. You have to fight back when someone takes your property, Mourad had insisted. Nephew, cousin, brother—if you steal my land, I’ll do anything to get it back. I don’t understand this kind of one-way
solidarity
! You think he’d have let you grab some of
his
property? I doubt it!

Confronting the tribe, Mohammed was weak; he knew his complaints would go nowhere. No point in fighting the customs of centuries. His children had almost no connection with all that. And anyway, no one in the village would understand why Mohammed was displeased. The tribe is the tribe. No arguments. No criticism. We’re not Europeans here. The family is sacred! That’s how it is, and that’s that.

Mohammed began to think out loud: But Europeans
love their families—they celebrate at Christmas, get together, chat, sing. I spent one Christmas Eve with Marcel’s family. They drink too much, though, and I don’t like that; everybody drinks: the children drink and get drunk with their parents. I didn’t say anything, but I was afraid my kids might one day turn out like Marcel’s. They have their customs, we have ours; we’re not all obliged to do the same thing. LaFrance is my workplace: the plant, the fumes of plastic, oil, and the paint I used on the endless assembly line. My father smelled of sweat and ploughed earth. I smelled of chemicals, an acrid metallic odour I grew used to. But my children didn’t come hug me close for fear of a whiff of it—they pecked me on the cheek and said, Hi, Pa!

Aïe!
Hi, Pa! Me, I kissed my parents’ hands and begged them to bless and forgive me in case I might have done something wrong. Hi, Pa! Sure, hi yourself, sonny!

When his children were still young, they’d gone back to the village with him. They’d amused themselves, played with the animals, tossed rotting chicken guts at the cats to lure them within capturing range, and made toys out of any old thing. They had diabolical imaginations and were quite boisterous, annoying, spoiled, without any self-control. The neighbours said they hadn’t been brought up properly, didn’t respect anyone or anything! LaFrance was responsible—unless it was the
parents’
fault, for letting the kids walk all over them. The parents couldn’t bear to hear their offspring criticised, however, and blamed that hyperactivity on the vacation
itself. As for the children, it never even crossed their minds that they truly belonged to this sprawling clan. They looked after themselves as best they could, ate here or there: every house in the village was open to them. No one thought twice about it. The kids loved the old uncle who claimed to have lived to a hundred thanks to pure honey; they believed him and made themselves honey sandwiches all day long. One even told
Mohammed
it was almost as good as Nutella!

But after a week or so, they’d grow bored, become aggressive, clamour to go to the beautiful beaches at Agadir. Mohammed would take them there and keep an eye on them from a nearby café. After bringing them back to the village in the evening, he’d feel exhausted but could refuse them nothing. One day his elder sister,
Fattouma
, asked him, Why don’t you slap them? They’ve got bad manners, those kids, and when they come here they upset our children, teach them things I can’t believe—my God, that’s it: they’re little Frenchies! My baby brother has brought us some little Christians, foreigners.

And then there was young Nabile, who ran
everywhere
, fell often, hurt himself, but didn’t cry. His mother, Fattouma, sometimes called him Malak, “Angel,” or Baraka, “God’s Gift.” This child is different, she’d tell people.

God has sent him to us, a sign of deliverance and future prosperity. We have to let him do as he pleases. He doesn’t know what evil is. To him, everyone is good. He walked at two years, talked at three; we couldn’t tell what he was saying but could guess what he meant. He
made signs, precise gestures to express himself. The midwife told me that I’d eaten too much garlic and that’s why Nabile was born special. A young doctor in the
hospital
in Marrakech tried to explain to me once, telling me things I didn’t understand: You’re too old to have children, you shouldn’t have made this boy, but now you have to live with his slowness. He isn’t bad, he’ll even be quite affectionate, but it will be tiring. The doctor drew a picture to show me, a kind of branch with
twenty-three
rows of leaves, right and left, then underlined the twenty-first branch and said: You see, there, three leaves—that’s one leaf too many. It’s that tiny “too much” that causes the problem. I kept the drawing; I’m waiting for my son who’s at university to come home and explain it to me. Nabile is unique. After Koranic school (where he didn’t learn a thing), I agreed to give him to my brother Mohammed, who registered him with the state as if he’d been his own son. After everything had been arranged, Mohammed took Nabile off to France, where he goes to a school that has a class just for children like him. He likes school. He learns music, does theatre, and plays several sports. If I’d kept him with me, he’d have grown sicker and sicker, and I’d have gone crazy.
Fortunately
, Mohammed took charge of him. Today he’s a tall young man, elegant, funny, intelligent. When he comes back on vacation, he brings me presents and helps me with the housework. He’s healthy and especially loving, an angel, a
baraka
. The last time, he insisted I come back with him to France. I told him: I have no passport, no visa, no money! He didn’t understand. He grabbed a notebook, scribbled something, and handed it to me,
saying, Here, bassbor, isa, and me with you. He made me cry. I hugged him tight and felt his tears trickling down my neck.

Time. When very young, Mohammed had had
problems
with time. He didn’t know what it stood for, and he anchored it on important events during the year, but
living
to the rhythm of a wristwatch proved difficult because he didn’t have one. The day was divided up by the five prescribed prayers. His wristwatch was the sun and its shadow. Mohammed was sometimes able,
however
, to feel the real weight of time, to imagine it as a load on the back of a hobbling old man. To kill time, Mohammed would take that imaginary burden and kick it around. He’d till the soil especially slowly, and when he went to the mosque, he’d repeat the same prayer a few times. Animals had a better relationship with time, or at least with the rising and setting of the sun. Using the five daily prayers as reference points, Mohammed tried to fill the emptiness around them. Like everyone else in his village, he saw time as little more than something thought up by people in a hurry. He couldn’t figure out why they said, Time is money. On that score, he counted himself rich!

One day his cousin, the one who limped because of a work accident in Belgium, suggested they open a shop on the road to Marrakech and sell time. How’re you going to do that? asked Mohammed. Simple: I sell
tourists
all the time we’ve got too much of
around here! I know them—I’ve been around them in Europe. I’ll tell them, Come to our country; you’ll find lots of time
available. There’s nothing to do: you’ll rest, you won’t check your watches anymore, and at day’s end you’ll wonder where the time went. Clever, no? And he told Mohammed, If you help me, we’ll make a fortune! Mohammed replied, Time is wind, the dust in the air, the sun, the moon, the stars, and Joha. You remember Joha—the guy who pretended to be an idiot when we were kids, to make us laugh?

Another time the cousin proposed they sell
ready-made
memories to tourists. When Mohammed asked him what he meant, the cousin replied, It’s simple. (Everything’s always simple with him.)

We bring the tourists to the village, invite them to tea, pass a bit of time with them, bring in our centenarian, old Hajji, who’ll read their palms while I translate, and then they’ll give us a little money for a small piece of sheepskin that will remind them of their visit. That’s the memory, the souvenir. The bigger the sheepskin, the more important the memory, hey? … You know, Mohammed, you’re a real wet blanket; you never believe in anything! It’s just impossible to get a business deal going with you. Hey, I’ve got another idea. You can’t
disagree
with this one, listen: I saw some rich people on the TV, Frenchies or Spanioolies who come to live with poor peasants. It gives them a change from their big buildings, cars, everything we haven’t got, so we’re going to sell the countryside. It’ll be a vacation village for rich people tired of being rich: they’ll come to us for the experience of nothing. Us, we’ve got nothing, no water, no electricity, big nothing, so they’ll come to live the way their really ancient ancestors did, going to the well,
using candles; they’ll eat whatever there is without being allowed to complain, and they’ll pay us for it! More and more retirees are settling in Morocco, so a married
couple
… that means two retirees, two monthly checks, enough to live like a government minister—no,
better
… so we’ll go looking for clients among these carefree retirees. Isn’t that a great plan? We’ll have to go to
Marrakech
or Agadir to put the ad in their papers.

When I was in the city of Mons, I knew some Belgians who retired and went off to India to be with a flimflam guru—you know, the real skinny kind of guy with a long beard, who sits cross-legged on a seriously
uncomfortable
mat, gazing into the distance while the Europeans at his feet soak up his silence as if it were a prophet’s blessing. Can you imagine, they’re ready to swallow just about anything, so I’ll take hundred-year-old Hajji, dress him up in a lovely white silk robe, dye his long beard with henna, hand him some prayer beads, and introduce him as the master of patience and silence, and it’ll work: they’ll come by the hundreds just to smell his perfume and venerate his serenity, plus we’ll tell them that Hajji is in communication with what awaits us on the other side, but he also knows how to prepare us to enter that other world, and then you toss in a few verses of the Koran, you burn the herbal incense Pa Brahim sells on the Jamaa al-Fna square in Marrakech, and it’s in the bag!*

No? You’re not interested? You’re making a face. Too bad for you! I’ll go peddle my idea to one of those
bandits
in Marrakech, you know, like that guy who
managed
to sell the neighbourhood mosque to an American
tourist by showing it to her between prayers, making her believe it was a
ryad
, so she took the bait, handed over a fat advance in dollars—not a check, oh no, wads of greenbacks.* When she came back six months later, she was so ashamed of having fallen for this scam that she burst out laughing with rage and left the city, saying Moroccans were the champions of cheating! The story made the rounds of Marrakech, to the crook’s despair, because he had other projects in mind as juicy as the mosque deal. He’d already sold the same property a few times, a real cash cow, like that parking metre he’d installed downtown for a little steady income. One day he even managed to palm off one of his wife’s caftans as an antique robe from the nineteenth century. He always manages to find suckers to swindle.