The Last Friend Read online

  No way! I didn't want to hear any more about Ceuta and its whores. I have never forgotten old Mercedes and her false teeth. Burlesque images replayed themselves in my mind. All I could think about was the story of the vagina with sharp teeth. Mamed could tell I was unhappy. He thought it had to do with morality, guilt, or sin. No, I was troubled because I had seen something I should not have had to see, a moment of incredible pathos: a toothless woman wiping her thighs with an old wet rag while I pulled on my pants. Mamed tried to console me. He came home with me, and we spent the evening listening to the radio. I felt like crying. Early the next morning, we went to the hammam in the Rue Ouad Ahardane.

  4

  Mamed NO longer hid when he had a cigarette, but he never dared smoke in front of his parents. It was a matter of respect. His father was a courteous, reserved man. When I greeted him, I kissed his hand, as I did with my own father. He did not know that everyone called his son Mamed, a diminutive of Mohammed.

  One day, a school friend phoned Mamed's house, and his father answered. He did not appreciate his son's nickname, and gave him a lecture. "It was an honor for me to give you the name of our beloved prophet. I slaughtered the sheep with my own hands at your baptism, and here you are allowing yourself to be given this ridiculous name. Your name is Mohammed, and I don't want to hear 'Mamed' ever again."

  Mamed told us about this, adding that he was a bad Muslim, and found it difficult to bear the name of the prophet.

  Anyway, practically everyone in Morocco was named Mohammed.

  During the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast between dawn and dusk, we went to see our friend Francois. He had prepared mushroom omelettes for us. Mamed insisted on having a slice of ham and a glass of wine, too. Not only was he not fasting, he was flouting Muslim dietary laws. The omelette was enough for me; I begged Allah to forgive my momentary lapse. At sunset, we gathered around our family dinner tables, pretending to be weak from hunger and thirst like the others.

  The evenings of Ramadan had something magical about them. The cafes were full. The men played a Spanish dice game. The women paraded their children through the streets. The city was lively. Mamed smoked cigarette after cigarette, a brand called Favorites, the cheapest, and certainly the worst for your lungs. On my first trip to France, I brought him a carton of Gitanes. He gave them back, saying he hated good tobacco. He preferred to stick to his Favorites. A few days later, he asked me to give him the Gitanes back, explaining that he hadn't wanted to get used to them, since he couldn't really afford such a luxury.

  Mamed and I were given more or less the same amount of pocket money. Our parents were not rich. Mamed was always calculating his expenses. With his taste for cigarettes, wine, and magazines like Hot Jazz, he was always overspending. I loved movies, and found a vendor in the medina who stocked unsold copies of film magazines and newspapers. Everyone called him "Monstruo," because of his physical handicaps. He was twisted in every way possible, but he ran his small shop expertly. No one dared to make fun of him, apart from his nickname, which he had learned to accept. "So what if I'm all twisted, I can still screw your sisters!" he would say. He bought unsold copies by the kilo and let us rifle through the piles. There were all sorts of French magazines, from the highbrow Cahiers du cinema and Les Temps modernes to the lowbrow Saint les copains.

  The two of us swapped books and magazines. Mamed made fun of me because I liked Cahiers du cinema, which he considered elitist. He preferred the Cine Revue, and a magazine that had stories with pictures of naked women. We had intense debates; our other friends felt excluded. They saw us as intellectuals, interested mainly in France. They were right. When we weren't talking about sex, we were discussing culture and politics. Despite our differences, we felt close and complicitous. Neither of us ever made an important decision without asking the other. But oddly enough, we never talked about our friendship. We shared most of our lives with each other, and we were happy. It was our classmates' jealousy that made us realize how serious our friendship was.

  From time to time, Ramon would join us, commenting with amusement on our closeness. He said it was unusual, that we were closer than brothers, and he wished he could be a part of it, but the fact that he was a manual laborer made this difficult. He was wrong. It certainly did not stop us from seeing him when we wanted to pick up girls.

  5

  After the baccalaureate, our paths were destined to diverge. With his scientific bent, Mamed wanted to study medicine. He dreamed about it. It was his calling. He got a scholarship and left for Nancy, in the east of France. I went to Canada for film studies. For the first few months, we wrote to each other a lot, then less frequently, but we spent that summer together on the beach in Tangier, just like in the good old days. We fell right back into our same routine: flirting with women on the beach, listening to music in the evening, and talking endlessly about the state of the world. We even covered the walls of the American School of Tangier with graffiti, with slogans like down with American imperialism, go home, and VIETNAM WILL CONQUER.

  That was when Mamed told me he had joined the French Communist Party. First he harangued me with hackneyed Communist rhetoric (he seemed to have lost his sense of humor again), then read Lenin to me, whom he called "the genius." He smoked just as much as before, and said how happy he was to get back to his old, unexportable Favorites. His political activism monopolized most of his time. I was bothered by the fact that he was not at all interested in my film studies. The one time he mentioned it, he launched into a diatribe: American films helped destroy the culture of the Third World, John Ford was a racist, Howard Hawks was a manipulator, and Raoul Walsh was a one-eyed visionary.

  I discovered that ideological indoctrination can blind even an intelligent mind. Our discussions no longer had the same intimacy as before. The only time it came back was when Mamed talked about the girls in Nancy. He told me he was through with sodomy. The girls there were willing to have sex, real sex, and they adored Moroccans. "They say our skin glows with sunlight and desire. Can you imagine? Beautiful girls, available girls, and they aren't whores. You can talk to them like equals! Ali, you should really come to Nancy. With all my coursework and Communist Party meetings, there isn't much time for sex, but I manage… The only way I betray the Party is sexually. I never screw comrades. I prefer girls who aren't communists, I don't know why. Comrades, even the pretty ones, don't turn me on. It's true, I have a better time with a laboratory assistant or a sales girl at Monoprix than with a girl from the Party. They're less hung up, too; they don't have to be begged to suck and swallow; they adore it. I have a steady girl, Martine, and two or three I sleep with from time to time. They're nice, not complicated, direct, liberated, happy. It's not like here. Remember Khadija and Zina? What neuroses! Nothing but complexes and complications! 'Don't touch my hymen!' Well, thank goodness I never did. Otherwise, now I'd be stuck with two kids. I think Khadija finally managed to get hold of an Arabic professor, you know, the guy with the bifocals, the shy one. They got married, she left school, but he makes only a thousand one hundred and fifty-two dirhams a month; I saw his paycheck. Of course, I've seen Khadija again. I fucked her, as usual, but she wouldn't kiss me or suck me. She said she saves that for her husband! They're something else, those Moroccan girls. But you know what I like about her? When you're inside her, she squeezes her thighs together and rocks back and forth. It's right out of Nafzawi's Perfumed Garden . I'm sure that's where she got it.

  "There are also Moroccan girls in Nancy," he went on. "I prefer the nonbelievers. They're willing to do anything, and they're good in bed. In France I do everything prohibited by our religion. I eat ham, I drink Bordeaux, I have sex with married women. I forgot to tell you that my regular girl is the wife of the university accountant. We get together at the end of the afternoon, when he's still at work. It's perfect. What about you and women? With your good looks, refinement, and good breeding, you must have a lot of success. It's true, I humor again), then read Lenin to me, whom h
e called "the genius." He smoked just as much as before, and said how happy he was to get back to his old, unexportable Favorites. His political activism monopolized most of his time. I was bothered by the fact that he was not at all interested in my film studies. The one time he mentioned it, he launched into a diatribe: American films helped destroy the culture of the Third World, John Ford was a racist, Howard Hawks was a manipulator, and Raoul Walsh was a one-eyed visionary.

  I discovered that ideological indoctrination can blind even an intelligent mind. Our discussions no longer had the same intimacy as before. The only time it came back was when Mamed talked about the girls in Nancy. He told me he was through with sodomy. The girls there were willing to have sex, real sex, and they adored Moroccans. "They say our skin glows with sunlight and desire. Can you imagine? Beautiful girls, available girls, and they aren't whores. You can talk to them like equals! Ali, you should really come to Nancy. With all my coursework and Communist Party meetings, there isn't much time for sex, but I manage… The only way I betray the Party is sexually. I never screw comrades. I prefer girls who aren't communists, I don't know why. Comrades, even the pretty ones, don't turn me on. It's true, I have a better time with a laboratory assistant or a sales girl at Monoprix than with a girl from the Party. They're less hung up, too; they don't have to be begged to suck and swallow; they adore it. I have a steady girl, Martine, and two or three I sleep with from time to time. They're nice, not complicated, direct, liberated, happy. It's not like here. Remember Khadija and Zina? What neuroses! Nothing but complexes and complications! 'Don't touch my hymen!' Well, thank goodness I never did. Otherwise, now I'd be stuck with two kids. I think Khadija finally managed to get hold of an Arabic professor, you know, the guy with the bifocals, the shy one. They got married, she left school, but he makes only a thousand one hundred and fifty-two dirhams a month; I saw his paycheck. Of course, I've seen Khadija again. I fucked her, as usual, but she wouldn't kiss me or suck me. She said she saves that for her husband! They're something else, those Moroccan girls. But you know what I like about her? When you're inside her, she squeezes her thighs together and rocks back and forth. It's right out of Nafzawi's Perfumed Garden . I'm sure that's where she got it.

  "There are also Moroccan girls in Nancy," he went on. "I prefer the nonbelievers. They're willing to do anything, and they're good in bed. In France I do everything prohibited by our religion. I eat ham, I drink Bordeaux, I have sex with married women. I forgot to tell you that my regular girl is the wife of the university accountant. We get together at the end of the afternoon, when he's still at work. It's perfect. What about you and women? With your good looks, refinement, and good breeding, you must have a lot of success. It's true, I was always a little jealous of you. Come on, I'm joking, you're not going to pout about that. You people from Fez don't have much of a sense of humor, but you're clever and calculating. Well, you know my opinion on that subject. Except for you. I like you."

  I told Mamed he was as racist and misogynist as ever. He pretended not to have heard me, and started talking about international politics. Then between two sentences on American imperalism, he stopped. "Miso-what?To you, women are inferior creatures. You think just like religious Muslims. I'm not religious, I'm an atheist, and I love women. Me, misogynist? That's not right, Ali. You're talking nonsense. And racist? Me a racist? Just because people with white skin get on my nerves, you call me a racist! People from Fez make everybody mad. That's not racism; that's regionalism. I'm not the only one who says that. Our Arabic teacher used to make that distinction. People from Fez are swarming all over Tangier. They have the best jobs, do well in school, and to top it all off, we're supposed to like them! No, Ali, I can forgive you for being from Fez, but don't push it."

  6

  I was still in love with Zina, and I had a hard time tolerating the cold weather in Quebec. This did not prevent me from having a girlfriend. A Vietnamese immigrant, whose parents had fled the war, she was sweet and exotic, spoke very little, and liked to snuggle in my arms for hours at a time. She was twenty but looked sixteen, which bothered me when we went out. Everything about her was small. She had breasts like flower buds, small, firm buttocks, and a tiny vagina. All of this was exotic to me, but our relationship was more about friendship than love. She introduced me to her parents; I was happy to have discussions with them about their lives, their exile, and their hopes for the future. They hated Communists, but they didn't want Americans in their country, either. They adored France and its culture, and were waiting for papers so they could move to some suburb of Paris.

  I wrote love letters to Zina, who responded by quoting lines from Chawki, considered by Moroccans to be "the prince of poets." Zina wanted to get married, to have children, a house, and a garden. She finally found all that with a distant cousin, much older than she, who had a job that was not exactly well-defined. Actually, like many men from the Rif Mountains, he was a kif dealer, selling potent Moroccan marijuana. Mamed wrote to me one day saying that on one of his visits to Tangier, he learned that Zina's husband had been arrested by the Spanish police and sentenced to several years in prison. From then on, Zina stopped writing to me. She was raising her child alone in a big house with a huge garden, where she had installed swings and hammocks. She spent most of her time there, reciting Sufi poetry. Mamed intimated that she never left the premises. Watched by her husband's family, she was not allowed beyond the doorstep. Her husband was kept informed of everything she did. One day he asked to see his son. One of his brothers came to pick up the boy for a visit. Zina had no say. The boss had decided. She had to obey without comment. Not even her parents were allowed to see her. They had been opposed to the marriage. "This family isn't like us," they had said, "and we're not like them. But our daughter has gone mad. She's crazy about this man."

  When I heard this, I was tempted to play the hero and risk the wrath of the Rif mountain clan by rescuing Zina and her son. But where could I take them? I thought of Ramon, who had left the family plumbing business to become a real estate agent. He always had plenty of apartments to rent. Then I thought maybe Zina was happy where she was, that maybe she liked men who made her suffer. She used to tell me she liked men who were rough with her. I was never good at doing that, and some women left me because of it. Nevertheless, I let the scenario run through my head, thinking of Fritz Lang's Hindu Tomb, attributing to myself the strength and courage I lacked in real life.

  7

  During the summer of 1966, our youthful illusions were shattered. Married was arrested by the police. Just hours after his return from France, two men in civilian clothes knocked on his parents' door, asked for his passport, and took him away in an unmarked car. At that moment, I was on a plane from Montreal to Casablanca. When I arrived, there was nothing to alarm me. The police formalities and customs inspection went as usual. In Tangier, though, my parents had received a visit from a cousin who worked in the local government. He told them I should postpone my return to Morocco, but it was too late. Student activists were being arrested. Those who did nothing more than hold leftist opinions were being arrested. Mamed's parents had had no news of him for two weeks. Meanwhile, the "gray men," as my mother called them, came to our house at six in the morning to arrest me. They offered no explanations. They simply carried out their orders. We used to say that the Moroccan police had inherited all the worst characteristics of the French. They had probably been trained in France, learning how to be ruthless and uncaring.

  In prison, I saw Mamed, who was almost unrecognizable. He had lost weight, and his head had been shaved. We were among a hundred or so students who had been arrested for "crimes against state security." We didn't understand what was going on. Mamed had been tortured. He had a hard time walking. The first thing he told me was that he hadn't said anything because he didn't know anything. "Usually, when you're tortured, you talk, but I didn't know what they wanted to hear. I made things up so they would stop beating me. I said anything that came into my head, but they became eve
n more vicious. They had files on each of us dating back to high school. Someone we knew must have been a spy. With some cross-checking, I figured out who it was. Every group has a traitor. Ours was just a poor average guy getting back at a world that had not been good to him. The worst thing was that he made his career in the Moroccan bureaucracy, and ended up with an important job in the Ministry of the Interior. My conscience was clear. In any case, we hadn't done anything serious. We hadn't plotted against the government. We had just discussed the political situation amongst ourselves. They wanted information about the Algerian National Liberation Front, about our Algerian friends who had gone to fight in the war against the French. They deliberately distorted the facts to try to make us confess to serious crimes. Of course, they knew I was in the Communist Party, but the Party is legal, after all."

  Mamed's look was a mixture of pride and sadness. Even after everything he had been through, he seemed strong. He hugged me tightly, and whispered in my ear, "Did you screw a lot in Quebec?" I burst out laughing. The other prisoners were not from Tangier. Some of them were common criminals who couldn't understand what we were doing there. "You didn't sell a kilo of hashish? You've never stolen anything? You never even hit one of those bastard cops?" For them, politics was an abstraction. Another prisoner, an older guy who appeared to be one of the leaders, asked: "What's politics anyway? Do you want to be ministers, and have a car with a chauffeur? You want a secretary in a short skirt, you want to smoke cigars and be on TV? When we get out, I'll get you all that. Not the title of minister, but everything else. You're decent guys. You went to school and even then they arrested you! It's crazy. This country is in trouble. I mean, things are going well, but they're making some serious mistakes. All you two did is talk. You could never kill anybody. You're too soft, too polite, too well brought up. You're no threat to anyone. I don't understand what the hell you're doing here… This country is in trouble."