The Last Friend (3 page)

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."

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.

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 even 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."

The guy was about fifty, and he was sure he would be released within the week. Sure enough, the guards came in one day and told him he was free. He was not a political threat; he was just a drug trafficker exporting Moroccan marijuana to Europe. When he left, he winked at us, as if to say we would see each other soon. He just had time to tell us his name, or rather his nickname, "Blondy," and that he hung out at the Cafe Central in the Socco, the little square that was the nerve center of the medina in Tangier.

Mamed and I spent two weeks in that prison, and then we were transferred to a disciplinary army boot camp, where we stayed for eighteen months and fourteen days without a trial. One morning, an officer came to see us and told us we had to sign a letter asking King Hassan II to pardon us. Very bravely, Mamed asked why. "We haven't done anything. We haven't committed any crimes that need to be pardoned." The officer told Mamed he was stubborn as a mule, and that he reminded him of his son, who also questioned everything. "Here you are lucky enough that our beloved king-may Allah glorify him and grant him a long life-is in a good mood, and you have the nerve to talk back? Come on, sign it. Otherwise you'll be accused of disobedience to our beloved king-may Allah glorify him and grant him a long life-and then things get serious, very serious. You're lucky I'm such a nice guy. If you'd ended up with El Lobo, the Wolf, you'd be counting how many teeth you had left."

Mamed glanced at me. I nodded my head. We signed our names at the bottom of a piece of paper from the Ministry of Justice. One thing was certain: the king didn't even know we existed. Whether we asked for a pardon or for the hand of his daughter in marriage, the result would be the same. We didn't exist.

Those nineteen months of incarceration disguised as military service sealed our friendship forever. We became serious, older-seeming, more mature. Our discussions were more focused, even if we prided ourselves on a certain lightness, on our senses of humor. Now we talked about women with a sort of detachment and respect.

The food in the camp was so disgusting that I would hold my nose and swallow it fast. One day, it went down the wrong tube, and I almost choked to death. Mamed saved my life. He yelled as loud as he could for help, pounding me on the back. I turned blue and almost stopped breathing. Mamed's screams were so urgent that eventually the guards believed it was really an emergency, and they called a doctor. I was in Mamed's arms; I heard him begging me not to die. Thanks to him and his quick reflexes, I survived.

Another time, Mamed was the one who got sick. He had terrible stomach cramps. He was doubled up in pain, vomiting a greenish liquid. We had no medicine or drinking water. He had a high fever and was shaking like a leaf. It was the middle of the night and nobody came, even though we called for h elp. I massaged his stomach until morning. He fell asleep while I kept massaging. The next morning, he was transported to the camp infirmary, and then to a hospital, where he stayed for more than a week. He came back pale and thin. He saw that I had been worried about him. As if to reassure me, he told me we were linked in life and death, and that nothing and no one could ever destroy our friendship.

We paid off Llrange, a decent guard, to bring us notebooks and pencils. We decided to keep a journal. Claiming he was not much of a writer, Mamed dictated his thoughts to me. It became clear that we did not have the same perception of time, or of the life we were leading within those four walls. He told me about a female ogre with plastic teeth who visited him at the same time every day, with whom he talked about his future. He made up all sorts of crazy stories. If he hadn't been sick, he might have been taken for a surrealist. But though he had a sense of form, he lacked the vocabulary.

After we got out of prison, neither of us was ever the same. Despite our appeals to high-ranking officials, we couldn't get our passports renewed to leave the country. We were still being punished. The royal pardon had not restored all of our personal freedoms. One morning, soon after our release, we met our old friend Ramon in the hammam. He liked the Moorish baths. We told him we needed women immediately. He took care of everything, even paying for the women. Unfortunately, it seemed our sex organs were still traumatized by our incarceration. I felt bad about it. Ramon tried to reassure me, saying this often happened to him. I knew he was lying to make me feel better. The wine was OK, the girls were nice, but we were completely out of our element.