Horses of God

1

YOU MIGHT WALK right past our part of town without ever suspecting it was there. A high, crenellated adobe wall separates it from the boulevard, where an uninterrupted stream of cars makes an unholy din. In this wall we’d hollowed clefts like arrow slits so we could freely contemplate the other world. When I was a kid our favorite game was to pour bowls of piss on to rich passersby, biting our lips as they cursed, yelled insults, and looked up at the sky. My brother Hamid was our leader; he rarely missed his target. We’d watch him do his stuff, stifling our laughter, which, seconds after the golden shower, would burst out uncontrollably. We’d be jubilant, rolling around in the dust like puppies. Ever since the day a stone thrown by a furious victim hit my head, I was never quite the same. At least that’s what everyone around me thought; that’s what had been drummed into me nonstop since I was little. I ended up accepting it and, eventually, quite liking it. All my escapades were half forgiven on account of that handicap. But I was no stupider than anyone else. In soccer, everyone will tell you, I was the slum’s best goalie. My idol’s name was Yachine. The legendary Yachine. I never saw him in action but there were so many stories. . Some claimed he could stop a ball fired from a Krupp cannon, others that his body defied the laws of gravity. People even said that his premature death had been plotted by international strikers, put to shame by his talent. Whatever the truth, I wanted to be Yachine or nothing. So I changed my name to his. Yemma didn’t like it, but since I refused to answer to the name for which a lamb had been sacrificed in front of our shack, she’d had to get used to it. Only my father, who’d always been old and stubborn, kept on with the outdated “Moh.” You’re not going to get very far with a name like that.

In any case, I didn’t hang around in life too long because there wasn’t a lot to do. And I have to say right now: I’m not sorry to be done with it. I don’t have the slightest nostalgia for the eighteen or so years of misery that were my lot. Although at first, in the days straight after my death, I’d have found it hard to say no to those biscuits my mother used to make with salty butter, her honey cakes or spiced coffee. Still, those earthly needs slowly faded and even the memory of them eventually vanished too, eroded by my new status as a ghost. If in the odd moment of weakness I still think of Yemma stroking me as she rooted around in my hair, getting rid of the nits, I say to myself: “Get a grip, Yachine, your head’s been blown to smithereens. Where could the nits go burrowing if you no longer have any hair?” No, I’m glad to be a long way from the corrugated iron, the cold, the sewers spilling their guts, and all the putrid stench of my childhood. I won’t describe where I am now because I don’t know myself. All I can say is that I’m reduced to an entity that, to use the language of down below, I’ll call consciousness: that is to say, the restful outcome of myriad lucid thoughts. Not the dark, narrow ones that dogged my brief existence, but thoughts with aspects that are infinite, iridescent, sometimes dazzling.