Horses of God

6

IN SOCCER, DEFENDING players have lower status than attacking players. People only ever remember the goal scorers. And yet, the real battle is fought at the back and in midfield. If Khalil, our central defender, didn’t command attention, he was very much a linchpin of the team. And I have to admit, I owe a good part of my notoriety to him. Without good defenders, a goalkeeper is lost; he lets everything in. In fact, I’d like to pay public tribute to that talented boy. There, it’s done. The truth is, Khalil and I didn’t have much in common. We’d always be bickering on the field. And sometimes off it, too. One day, accusing me of siding with the enemy, because of a save I’d missed, he threw a broken bottle at me, without warning, which cut me on the left shoulder. It was no big deal, just a scratch, but at the sight of blood, my brother came charging over, right in the middle of the game, swinging his bicycle chain, and laid into him with insane violence, almost finishing him off. I remember a curious thing: Khalil, barely conscious, scrabbling in the dust, trying to locate the two teeth he’d just lost, as if he could stick them back in, like a bridge he could simply replace to restore his smile. Hamid, whose strength increased tenfold at times like this, was bellowing like a wild animal as he went at him. The others hadn’t attempted to separate them because no one liked this stuck-up boy who’d just turned up from the city and thought the sun shone out of his ass. Forming a circle round the brawl, stoking the rage in my brother’s eyes, they were yelling in unison: “Kill him! Kill him!” Curled up on the ground, his hands protecting his bruised face, Khalil begged us for help, calling on the good Lord and His saints. But the good Lord wasn’t around; He’d long since turned His august gaze away from Sidi Moumen. I fought like the devil to extract my brother from the scrum and got punched in the process, which hurt a lot more than the scratch that had started the fight. Restraining Hamid once he’d lost it was some feat. He broke free and let rip again, giving his victim an extra pummeling. The players were thrilled; they clapped as if they were celebrating a victory. One of them seized the chance to land a kick on the poor kid, who’d finally lost consciousness. That encouraged the rest of them and it turned into a real lynching. When my brother had calmed down, the injured boy was evacuated to the sideline and the game resumed as if nothing had happened.

Tall and thin, as ugly as hell (and losing his teeth didn’t help matters), Khalil always looked down on us. The fact that his family had tumbled from the city to the slums made him superior to us: he hadn’t been born poor — or at least so he claimed. In any case, he never missed an opportunity to brag about it. And yet he had to be unhappier than most of the local lowlifes. Being born in squalor is more bearable than being shoved into it later on. And even if he exaggerated his cosseted past, there was no doubt he’d come down in the world. The seediest alleyways of the medina are a lot better than our shantytown.

The son of a coach driver, with three younger sisters, Khalil might have avoided Sidi Moumen if a terrible accident hadn’t turned their lives upside down. The only horse his family possessed broke its leg, setting off a series of events that threw them on the scrap heap. After the animal had been put down, there was only one way to buy another: selling their house. The decision was a difficult one. Leaving the home of their forefathers was unthinkable. Their father wavered for a long time, asking advice from his closest friends, turning the question over in his mind a hundred times before he took the plunge and sold his property to a returning emigrant who’d just arrived from a Paris suburb and paid cash. Their mother sobbed as she followed the removal cart her husband had borrowed, loaded with all their possessions. Khalil didn’t understand what was happening. He was quite happy sitting among the furniture as the little cart made its way down the congested alleyways. First they went to live with an uncle, just until they sorted themselves out financially. But an argument between his mother and his aunt forced them out again. A long year at the home of his grandfather, who was himself already crammed into a confined space with several other families, and then they ran aground in Sidi Moumen, where all downward slides converge. In the meantime, instead of buying another horse and going back to his old job, the coach driver decided, in a move he considered shrewd, to invest his savings in a Chinese prescription-glasses business, which proved to be a disaster. And, since forgery was involved, in addition to having his merchandise confiscated, he could have gone to prison. The remainder of his money wound up in the pocket of the judge, who spared him that fate. As for the con man — that charming crook who claimed he’d knocked about a bit in the business world and had promised them the earth — he vanished into thin air, leaving the coach driver and his family in the gutter, on their knees. It took them a long time to get back up again, but the father still had some fight left. With the help of a few friends, he built adobe walls at the end of a row of shacks, covering them with a roof of corrugated iron, plastic, branches, and stones. He dismantled his now useless coach and could at least chop up the wood to make doors and windows. Then he went into selling single cigarettes.

The miracle of Sidi Moumen is the strange facility with which new arrivals adapt. Coming from parched fields or voracious metropolises, driven out by blind authority and the parasitical rich, they slip into the mold of resigned defeat, grow used to the filth, throw their dignity to the winds, learn to get by, to patch up their lives. As soon as they’ve made their nest, they sink into it, they go to ground, and it’s as if they’ve always been there and have never done anything but add to the surrounding poverty. They become part of the landscape, like the mountain of sewage, like the makeshift shelters, built of mud and spit, topped by satellite dishes like gigantic upturned ears. They’re here and they dream. They know the grim reaper is lurking, and that those who’ve given up dreaming will be first to go. But they are not going to die. They stick together; they support each other. Disease lies in wait, they can see it, can smell it. They defy it. Hunger may well stretch out its tentacles, gripping throats till they choke, but in Sidi Moumen it does not kill, because people share what little they have. Because they look to each other to measure their common distress. Tomorrow, it will be so-and-so’s turn. The day after, someone else’s. The wheel turns so fast. Between little and nothing lie a few crumbs, blown away by the merest breath.

The coach driver married off his two elder daughters to the first comers. Fewer mouths to feed is always a good thing. For big celebrations a ceremonial tent is erected near the pump. The ground is covered with carpets borrowed from neighbors, drapes are hung and decorated with palm leaves, dozens of lanterns are dotted around the place, and, for as long as the party lasts, the guests, all dressed up, imagine they’re living on the other side of the wall. The coach driver did not disappoint: he bled himself dry to give his daughters proper weddings, calling on Tamu each time to make a real night of it.

Khalil left school and became a shoeshine boy, working the streets, cafés, and all the bustling city squares.

Little by little, he became part of our group. He toned down his arrogance, and we became more easygoing, less aggressive. He’d often join us in the evenings at Nabil’s shack. He’d bring a bottle of Coca-Cola and some Henry’s cookies or a bit of hash, with his American tobacco and rolling papers. He’d tell us all about his fabulous days in the medina, his struggle for control of a strategic square, the tricks he’d use to deceive the café waiters, who’d chase off all interlopers: kids renting out newspapers, pedlars of contraband, pimps, pickpockets, shoeshine boys. . He’d describe to us in great detail the exquisite meals he’d treat himself to if the morning was successful: spicy sausage sandwich, puréed broad beans with olive oil and cumin, calves’ feet or a sheep’s head, roasted to perfection. He’d make our mouths water with all these marvels. On Fridays, he’d say, people give away couscous and whey outside their front doors. He’d been known to devour three breakfasts in a row, elbowing beggars out of the way to grab a bit of meat.

We knew he was exaggerating, but we loved hearing it anyway. He said it was a shame that slippers don’t need polishing, otherwise he’d have made a fortune! But he couldn’t complain. His father had set him a reasonable sum to bring home at the end of the day. And he managed it. And not by taking the easy way out like other boys his age: he only rarely had sex with tourists, even though it brought in the equivalent of a day’s work. No, that wasn’t his style, or only at times of extreme hardship.

And that was how, on account of a wretched broken leg, a family’s destiny had darkened. Though Khalil and I buried the hatchet, it was only years later that we spent any time together, at the garage. And that was because of Abu Zoubeir.