Horses of God

3

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.