Gates to Tangier (10 page)

She hoped that Marc
­
el would be awake, but she had no idea how to tell him what she now knew. She had always known that something strange was going on. But how can you know if it is all in your head? That's like knowing how, or what other people are thinking. Can you read the mind of another? We don't even know the thoughts of those closest to us. The conductor announced that they were at the final station.

It was five minutes from the final station to the apartm
­
ent she rented with Marcel. And Zohra was always afraid that in those five minutes someone would rape her. She t
­
old her boyfriend about these fears, but he never gave it much thought. "Never in a million years w
­
ill a man ever understand rape, or fear of rape," she thought. And it isn't worth it to insist and to explain why it scares us so much, and the humili
­
ation of it." Zohra had been raped once, when she was seventeen, one day after her boyfriend had left her. Someone had offered to give her a ride at an autostop, then after a few drinks together he took her to a warehouse and made her have sex with him. She hated him. Afterwards he cried and apologized for what he had done. She apologized and took her home. Her mother had scr
­
eamed at her, her step-father called her a whore, and even she felt dirty and guilty for what that idiot had done to her. She thinks about him often, when making love. But now she could put those thoughts aside. This time she only wanted Marcel.

She got home quickly, as if it weren't just her legs carrying her, but as if her vagina had grown le
­
gs to speed up her pace. She felt Marcel insi
­
de her long before he actually penetrated her. W
­
hen she arrived he was sleeping. She went to take a shower. A hot shower always makes sex better. Marcel preferred to shower aft
­
er making love.

She left the shower naked and got into bed, pushing up against him. He slept naked, but his cool b
­
ody didn't wake up. "I need you now," she thought, "I need you now more than ever. I can't help it," She touched his penis and made it as hard and str
­
ong as she could. He turned his back on her and snored a little. She turned him back onto his back and got on top of him, pushing him inside her. Her hips slid to the right and to the left, pushed in and out, and Marcel was still sleeping. She stopped trying to wake him up. That's how it went on for almost hal
­
f an hour until she orgasmed. She felt it throughout her whole body, in her skin, and in the organs. She slid off of him. He hadn't ejaculated. She thought, that was the be
­
st sex I have ever had. We should do that ag
­
ain. Fuck while sleeping. She lay down at his side, and he turned his back to her. She fell asleep.

In the morning they woke up together and made love again.

"Do you remember last night?" she asked.

"I had a wonderful dream."

He pulled her into his arms again and felt her love. As if they had just met yesterday. He might leave me today, she tho
­
ught. Who knows. After I tell him what I know.

"Today I'm free all day, I'll go get some croissants and we'll have some coffee together. I have something important to tell you."

"Yes, I see," said Marcel, winking.

"I'll put on some music."

He put on a Brassens CD and left the house while the singer crooned that there is no happy love.

When he got back, Zohra was half-asleep in bed. He prepared an
americano
and brought the coffee and croissants to bed.

"I want you again, before the coffee."

"I don't think I have the strength. Maybe later."

"Come here, come here, put the coffee on the table."

"It will get cold."

"So?"

They fell into each other's arms again. But Marcel wasn't focused. She smiled and he brought the coffee.

"What did you have to tell me?" he asked matter-of-factly.

"Wait - let's go to the living room table. C
­
ould you bring me some marmalade? The cherry marmalade in the fridge is really good.”

He brought the marmalade while she put on a white silk blouse. They sat down at the table.

"Yes. I could keep what I discovered a secret, but I'm a Sagittarius, and I think we should tell each other everything. You need to know the truth.”

"Yes, I've realized that by now." he said with a cynical sm
­
ile. She had the habit of saying anything and everything, without much tact. It was what he liked the most about her. It was differ
­
ent from all the manipulative women he had known.

"Well, what I have found out is...thi
­
s. I wanted to know why they removed my uterus, why I can't have kids, and the director of the hospital where I am doing my specialization sen
­
t a letter to the Tangier clinic where Dr. Flemon works. He asked for all my medical records and they came yesterday. He showed them to me, and..."

"You had uterine cancer when you were a girl."

"No, worse. Or, better. It depends on how you look at things. I was born a man.”

"What?"

'It isn't just about the uterus anymore. And I thought I was taking hor
­
mones because I don't have ovaries, but that wasn't why. They have given me hormones since I was very young, to turn me into a woman. What happened is that when they circumcised me, a Jewish rabbi did it, some Rabbi Cohen. This happens, sometimes Muslims ask a Jewish rabbi to do the circumcision, at the age of one or before. He didn't do a good job, and they couldn't save my penis, and the doctors decided it would be best to turn me into a boy. That's what is says in my case file. Incredible, right?

My mother never told me about this, you know. When I was twenty they gave me silicone breasts, because mine were too small, and no doctor has noticed, it is incredible. But now things are different.”

"You never felt anything odd?"

"Odd." Zohra looked at her life from a very different perspec
­
tive now. Everything from her past meant something different now. “When other children talk
­
ed about periods and I didn't, it seemed odd, s
­
o I invented periods, every 28 days I bought tampons and showed them to my friends, I even had menstrual dizziness, he
­
adaches, I had all the symptoms. A doctor told me I wouldn't get a period. En
­
joy it, he told me." Zohra started humming Brassens' "La Tempête".

“Yes, some things were strange," continued Zohra. “I liked playi
­
ng soccer, but other girls did too, I wasn't the only one. At the Jewish high school in Tangier. I don't know why my mother sent me to a Jewish school, she worked in the homes of Jews and it was the best school in Tangier, but you know what, I've been attrac
­
ted to women in the past. I made love to a few women, but I never felt like a lesbian. I could be with wom
­
en, and I feel like my way of seeing men is differe
­
nt from other women.  I couldn't give them chi
­
ldren.”

"You aren't the only one," said Marcel, trying to digest Zohra's news.

"That's not what the difference is, the difference is that I want to be a man with the man that I am with. Not only that he conquer me, that he penetrate me. And yet it is like my vagina c
­
an penetrate the penis of the man that I am with.”

"That seems pretty complicated to me." Some sunlight started to enter through the window, heating the room.

"Well that's how it is. Maybe I need help. Maybe I can go back to being a man, but after all those hormones I don't think it would be possible.”

"And tell me something, does it seem bad, in profess
­
ional terms, to change the sex of a one-year old boy, because of a circumcision gone wrong?”

“Professionally? They still do things like that. You have to consider the suffering of a man without a penis, at an early age. That's what they do, they change the sex, thinking that the person will suffer less. Today they can put in a prosthesis to substitute for a penis, which didn't exist back then, and it inflates, like a machine, but it doesn't make you a man. I can understand this operation from the point of view of a gynecologist, but from the psychological point of view...I don't know how good an idea it is. Well, it is over and done now. The situation is what it is, I am who I am.”

"Fine, fine. That was really important after all. I didn't expect that, I didn't expect you would tell me something like that. I thought that you were going to say that you had decided to marry
­
me, and that I was going to have to explain again that I don't want to get mar
­
ried, but actually I kind of want to now. So that you don't escape. I don't really know what this has to do with what you just told me, but maybe...it is just what we do now.”

"It would give your parents a heart attack, if you married a Moor!" she said, imitating his mother's way of speaking.

"That isn't important to me, anyway, you could still discover that your mother is a Jew that converted to Islam to marry a Muslim general who died in the Yom Kippur War in Ramat Hagolan. Or something like that.”

"Marcel, this isn't a joke. I can't talk about marriage for at least a year, this is to
­
o big for me. This changes my whole past, it changes me, my life. I see everything diffe
­
rently now. Those papers from Tangier changed everything.”

"Y
ou say goodbye and you don't go, or you go without really going."

"I have already returned."

"Yes, you have returned but you never left."

I
had a lot of excuses to be the first to leave Tétouan. I should go home, my daughter isn't well, I have patients waiting for me, I can't take more vacation days. I have to go back, the Spania
­
rds don't understand the seven days of
Abel
, they expect you to come back in three days, or before, the day aft
­
er the burial. They'll start to think that I have some psychological issue. They won't need me anymore. We've already seen Yosef's mother...and all the excuses, separate and combined...to be able to go back to Madrid.

But the moment I left that place - and I say that place as if it were something dirty, something that belongs to another life, a mistaken life, a fearful life, a forgotten life that it is better not to remember, I say "that place", as if saying "that place" means it isn't present, as if the two worlds cannot coexist. As soon as I arrived in Ceuta from Tétouan I had a lot of time to myself. I decided to stay one more day in Ceuta, to stay the night. And to walk around the main street without doing anything, eat
tapas
, some more
tapas,
have another beer, see the shops with such familiar names, Bentata, Hachuel, Benarroch, an infinite array of stores with Jewish names, and the whole city full of Arabs.

Women from the small towns come here and bring back laden with merchandise to s
­
ell from Tétouan, Tangier, Chaouen, or Larache. They take the same route every day. Sometimes on donkeys, and if they have money they take the taxis in the plazas, the ones that take seven people instead of five, squeezed in. Everything is tax-free, discmans, watches, mu
­
sical equipment, Nike and New Balance shoes, and more than half of the population are Moroccan Muslims. Many Jews live here and do good business, one of them opened up a store right at the border, a sort of duty-free shop, selling everything even cheaper, everything you could want to buy: Even
matzoh
from Israel, because Muslims say that that's the real
matzoh
.

But I'm hoping to capture something here, something that I lost many years ago. I remember family trips to Ceuta, to buy things we didn't have in Franco's time, I remember how my father met an ex-general who he had done business with in the past and they spent the day drinking, they got half-drunk, he almost couldn't drive, he vomited the whole tri
­
p but seemed very happy to have met this man. I traveled to Gibraltar from here, to buy watches and to see what Papá was doing there, buying fabric and selling them in Morocco, or buying anything that could bring in mon
­
ey. Seated in the bar I spot someone I know.

“You? Do you live here?”

“More or less. I really live in Barcelona, but my father moved his business here, so I'm visiting. I'll probably work here for a few months, he wants to move his whole business over onto computers, I'm buyi
­
ng them and setting up the accounting system.”

"Well, I'm traveling from Tétouan, I was here for a few days, and now I'm heading back to Madrid," I said, responding to the question that he was about to ask, or was thinking.

“Everyone comes back, where they want to or not, in the end they all come back. There is always a rea
­
son. I knew someone whose grandfather had left Tétouan for Oran fifty years ago, and he went back to see his grave. A Benzimra, like you, his last name was Benzimra...Waiter, please, some more tapas and two beers.

Chanquetes
, anchovies, potatoes, and other vegetaria
­
n things. No calamari, right?

You keep kosher?”

“No, not exactly. But my father died a month ago, and I've been keeping kosher since then. I don't even drink the
nesej
wine," said Fortu.

"Ah, that's why you came back. When the father dies, we want to understand, you remember the Hebrew profe
­
ssor we had, Mr. Levi? Remember?”