Horses of God (2 page)

From then on, I decided to fall in line and believe, like everyone else, that Morad had fled the slum to fend for himself in the city, like so many kids his age. Believe that he'd come back someday, his pockets so full that his parents would soon forget he'd run away and even encourage him to go off again and carry on. With hindsight, now that I'm up here, I'm not angry with my brother anymore. I tell myself that in a sense he did Morad a favor, in the same way that Abu Zoubeir did me one, except he didn't hit me with a stone. His weapons were different, more devastating. But I'll tell you about that later. Because Abu Zoubeir is very much alive. And still hanging out in a so-called garage with other half-starved wretches like me.

WITH HIS CHESTNUT
hair and green eyes, Nabil should have been born somewhere else. He looked so unlike the rest of us. Without his rags, on feast days, you'd have sworn he was from the other world. A reverse immigrant, one of those crusaders fresh from the North, come to rub up against our poverty, like the hippies. Yet he was definitely one of us. We'd grown up in the same filth, waded through the same sludge. He got his good looks from his mother, Tamu, a prostitute who'd decided to devote her charms to the layabouts of Sidi Moumen. A champion of cheap sex, she saw herself as providing a public service, and charged rates that were near communist. Tamu commanded particular respect in our neighborhood as well as in the surrounding slums. Some say she could have plied her trade anywhere, even in the rich parts of town, had she bothered to scrub up a bit.
Enlivened by her gold teeth, Tamu's luminous features exuded carnivorous charm. The eighty kilos of creamy flesh filling her satin djellabas drove men crazy as she walked by. She also worked as a singer on occasion, at weddings, baptisms, and circumcision ceremonies, and she sang so well that, despite their misgivings, the neighborhood women would eventually seek her out. Not one to bear grudges, and conscious of her talent, Tamu readily agreed to make an appearance in the most hostile of shacks. For spicing up a party she had no equal. She'd launch herself body and soul among the guests, tambourine under her arm and buttocks twitching as if an electric current had shot through her; fluttering her eyelids like a Hindu dancer, she'd slay one man and then the next, as her piercing voice rang out through the loudspeakers set up on the roof, spreading happiness into all the surrounding hovels.

Nabil lived alone with his mother in an isolated shack near the street pump. He'd spend the day outdoors because his mother saw her clients at home. That's why he'd be the first to show up at the dump and would only leave after dark. He worked for my brother Hamid, who treated him fairly. He protected him too. Woe betide anyone who dared to call him the son of a whore! Hamid, who was handy with his fists, would instantly pummel the guilty party. Anyway, after Morad disappeared, Nabil and I became inseparable. Sometimes I'd
help him out at the dump, picking up bones, bits of glass, and metal. Occasionally I'd turn up a ram horn, which was highly prized at the souk because it was used to make combs. I'd also skin the rubber from wires, to get to the copper. If he lent me his knife, I could make ten balls of it a day. Nabil had to fill the three burlap sacks that my brother would supply every morning. And he'd do it in style; whether the rain beat down or the wind blew a gale, the sacks were ready and tied up neatly by dusk. A wooden cart, dragged along by a skeletal mule with a one-eyed old man at the reins, made the rounds to collect them. Hamid no longer even bothered to come and check if the work had been done by the book. He trusted Nabil. He said that he was no cheat, unlike those other punks, who'd lie around sniffing glue all day. Although Nabil was better paid than the rest of them, money ran through his fingers, so he never saved any. He'd often invite me to share his tin of sardines, his barley bread, and a big bottle of Coca-Cola. We'd sit down in a shelter he'd built out of planks and cardboard and treat ourselves to a feast, talking about the city we'd go and visit one day. His mother had described it to him in fabulously lavish detail. I don't think he was making it up. The only time I was able to go there was the last time, when everything in my mind was so muddled.

Nabil dreamed of transforming his shelter into a real house. He already had the whole thing planned out: two
bedrooms, a corner for the kitchen, and a living room. As for a toilet, he'd do what everyone else did: go and relieve himself at the dump. But for the moment his project was difficult to get off the ground. Every time he picked up some corrugated iron, or a beam in good condition, it would be stolen. Still, he didn't give up hope. I promised to help him the day he started seriously planning the work. My brother Hamid said much the same: “We businessmen must stick together.” He suggested an empty hut for storing Nabil's materials: plastic, branches, bricks, girders—anything, in fact, that might help us build a roof that didn't leak and could withstand the lashing of the wind and other bad weather.

Nabil would dream. He used to say that the day I felt the need to stand on my own two feet, I could come and live with him. We'd have a brazier and a big pot for cooking up succulent tagines. It was only a question of time. If we worked hard and persevered, we'd get there. That was when I started to feel cramped at home. We slept six to a room no bigger than a cellar. I couldn't stand the snoring, or the mixture of barely identifiable odors: the stink of shoes, sweat, pants, the DDT powder that Yemma did her best to spread under the raffia sleeping mats every night. Yes, I too began to dream of a room of my own. Of a real bed with a box spring that no scorpion could scale, nor any other creature, except maybe ticks, which never really bothered me. In any
case, I much preferred them to the suffocating smell of insecticide. There wouldn't be mothballs in my room either. I don't know why Yemma was so concerned about moths; we had so little wool, so few clothes, that our hovel would have been the last place they'd go to feast. But Yemma was like that. The cleanest, shrewdest woman I ever had the good fortune to meet. Early each morning she'd begin by waking one of us to go and fetch water from the pump, though she'd spare the little ones. It took several trips to fill the big earthenware jar. She'd splash water over the yard in a kind of daily war against dust. Next she'd water the pots of basil that stood at the entrance to the bedrooms, to keep out mosquitoes. Finally, she'd fill the kettle to boil water for us to wash with, and set about preparing the breakfast we'd all have together. She loved watching us eat. She'd fuss over each of us like a mother hen. We were her men. Nine strong lads and a father who'd decided to be old before his time, crouched in his corner, endlessly fingering his amber prayer beads. He prayed sitting down because he claimed he no longer had the strength to stand. He, the former quarry worker, had become so thin, so desiccated, just like the wasteland that had once been the industrial district, where he'd always lived. Yemma would serve him his soup and plump up the cushions behind his back without a word. Then she'd look over our clothes like a corporal
inspecting his squad: a button missing from a shirt, a sock or jumper with holes in it would trigger an avalanche of reproach: “What! Are you trying to make me a laughingstock?” Or “Come on! You take that off immediately, I'm not dead yet!” And she'd grab the sewing basket. “Yachine,” she'd call out, “come over and thread this needle for me, you're the one with the best eyes.” I was so happy to have something that was better than the others. I'd moisten the thread between my lips and slip it through the eye first time. Yemma smiled at me. I loved seeing her smile.

Some days, Nabil would turn up on our doorstep at dawn. As soon as Yemma heard his whistle (that was his way of calling me), she'd dunk a crust of hot bread in the plate of olive oil and say: “Here, give this to your friend.” Looking hungry, his smile as wide as his ears, Nabil took it gratefully. He'd ask me for a glass of water to rinse out his mouth because in Sidi Moumen our teeth grated continuously, due to the dust that got everywhere. Then he'd wolf down the hunk of bread before he went to work. Nabil was no poorer than us, far from it. It was just that his bohemian mother was in the habit of sleeping in. She worked so late that getting up early was out of the question. To avoid waking her, he'd sneak out like a thief, on tiptoe. I have no idea how anyone could sleep with the garbage trucks' morning racket anyway. But around there, everyone got used to everything—to the
stench of rotting and death, for instance, which became so familiar and clung to our skin. We couldn't smell it anymore. And if it were suddenly, magically, to vanish, Sidi Moumen would lose its soul. The air would probably seem bland and insipid; dogs and cats would vanish from the scene, as would the hordes of seagulls that besieged the place, preferring its contaminated, sweltering heat to sea air, its shadowy foragers to fishermen of the deep. Even the old people would be bored if there were no more flies to swat away, or mosquitoes or anything. Can you imagine: Sidi Moumen, stripped bare! Without its wild nights at the dump. Without its campfires, where random musicians, their petrol cans transformed into mandolins, unfurl their laments into a hashishscented sky; and those fields of plastic bags that sing in the wind, while the teasing half-light turns the rubbish dunes into infinite beaches . . .

What? I'm rambling! Well, so what? What else can I do now that I'm consumed with loneliness and, like a strange ghost, skulk around my childhood memories? I'm not ashamed to tell you I was sometimes happy in that hideous squalor, in the filth of that accursed cesspit; yes, I was happy in Sidi Moumen, my home.

OF ALL THE
Stars of Sidi Moumen, only Fuad was able to go to school, which was a few kilometers from the shantytown. He lived in an outhouse of the mosque where his father performed various duties: muezzin, caretaker, imam, as well as other more unpleasant but no less lucrative chores, such as laying out corpses, exorcizing the possessed (or presumed possessed), or reading the Koran at the cemetery. Fuad lived for only one thing: playing soccer with us, which he was categorically forbidden to do. Yet he was unquestionably a born striker; he alone could make the difference in a big tournament. As soon as he could escape his father's clutches, he'd be back in the team, and the matches would be unforgettable. But Fuad was forever scanning the sky, because once he'd been caught right in the middle of the dump: from the top of his minaret,
the muezzin had spotted him as we waded through the muck after a ball. I can still see Fuad now, petrified, almost fainting, the second the cranky loudspeaker sputtered his name. His father's voice was unique and impossible to mistake, since we heard it five times a day. A shrill, artificial voice that made you want to do anything except go and pray. I reckon Fuad wet himself, knowing a beating was inescapable. In any case, after that incident, he disappeared from the scene for a long time. He'd been completely banned from going anywhere near us. And even from leaving home, except to go to school. We'd sometimes see him in the morning, his satchel on his back, being dragged along by his uncle like a condemned man to the scaffold. He'd shoot us a sideways glance, enviously, sending subtle signals to find out the results of the matches we were playing without him. If his uncle noticed, a vengeful slap would fall like lightning on his face. He'd growl at him, calling us every name under the sun. Under normal circumstances, a stone would have been sent flying through the air toward that creep. Hamid was a mean shot with his catapult. But he held off, so as not to make more trouble for Fuad.

So several months went by and the Stars were a bit lackluster. We continued with our brutal confrontations every Sunday, and the rest of the week we'd all go back to our normal lives. Nabil had joined the team
and was doing pretty well. He'd finally built his shack, a humbler construction than originally planned, but we'd gotten used to it, since it was now our headquarters. All the Stars would meet there to work out match tactics. Nabil was happy he'd left his family home, though his mother still visited several times a week. She'd bring him a basket crammed with food that we'd all feast on. She wouldn't stay long, since she knew her presence embarrassed him, especially if we were there. My brother Hamid had graciously donated a paraffin lamp and a radio-cassette player he'd unearthed in almost working order. We'd had it repaired for next to nothing, polished it, and placed it on an upturned crate in the middle of the room. What nights we'd spend in that shack, all huddled together, listening to Berber songs from the Middle Atlas and the furious rhythms of Nass el Ghiwane. Smoking spliffs, dreaming up fantastic stories . . .

To our great joy, one fine Sunday in July, we spied Fuad on top of a mound of garbage in his soccer getup—meaning bare-chested, wearing plastic sandals—waving his bony arms: he was back, with no explanation, to reclaim his place as center forward, which no one was in any position to contest. It was only a week later that we found out about his father, who'd been struck down by a stroke that paralyzed his left side, invading his face to the point that he couldn't speak—which is unfortunate
for a muezzin. Fuad's uncle had taken over the role straightaway. As the eldest male, Fuad quite naturally became head of the family. He wasn't yet fourteen. But being head had significant advantages: he immediately stopped school, had a mobile stall built, and began to sell cakes made by his mother and his sister, Ghizlane. He'd grown up overnight, though his puny body hadn't followed suit. Not much taller than a twelve-year-old, he had thin, bandy legs and an angular face that was swallowed up by his African features, and he always wore the somber expression of those who are born to be unhappy. Despite that, on a soccer field, it was as if no one else existed. We were proud to count him one of us. He and I were the pillars of the team; our combined talents warranted its glittering name.