Leaving Tangier

18. Siham

AZEL DECIDED TO RETURN to Barcelona by train. When he stopped off in Marbella and called Siham, he found her deeply shaken: the little girl had just thrown an ashtray in her face, and the parents were off at a health spa in the south of France. Siham’s wound was painful, but even worse was her dismayed realization that she really wasn’t qualified to take care of a handicapped child. Siham always did her best with the girl and never complained, but seeing no progress, she felt discouraged. And so she waited impatiently for Widad to fall asleep at night, the only time when she herself could get some rest. Usually groggy with exhaustion, Siham would sit in front of the television watching anything at all. Sometimes she thought about what her life would have been like if she had stayed in Tangier…

Back home, Siham would surely have become resigned to behaving like everyone else, never passing up any invitation or excuse to go out and join other girls who were in the same predicament, and by giving in to her boss (which would have allowed her — just barely — to earn a living), she would have become his mistress in hopes of one day becoming his wife. She would have fallen into every trap, run through every cliché, dreamed of every impossibility. She would have purchased fabrics imported from the Far East to make caftans she’d have worn once a year, and taken her mother to the yearly regional festival in honour of the sainted Moulay Abdeslam; gradually losing all her illusions, she would have wound up marrying a widower not too far past his prime and had problems with his children… Nevertheless, when she thought about it, Siham still preferred her present situation to that of her female cousins and friends back home. She’d heard from Wafa, one of her girlfriends, a high-school student, who had just gotten pregnant. She was trapped in a complete nightmare. The guy involved had laughed and simply told her off.

‘Don’t give me any grief! A seventeen-year-old who sleeps with the first man who comes along is a whore, so you’re on your own! Go see the woman who oversees the hammam: she’ll send you to a nice doctor, you know — you turn a few tricks for a little money, and your worries are over…’

He’d sounded like an actor in a play. Wafa hadn’t said another word. One day she had gone to his home and asked to see his wife, to whom she’d told her story. The betrayed wife was the one who had helped her get a safe abortion.

‘I’m used to it,’ she’d said. ‘This isn’t the first time. My husband’s a real sex fiend — he doesn’t make love, he sticks his thing in the hole and pumps out his balls, he’s a pathetic jerk I put up with only because we’ve got five children, but when they’re grown, I’ll throw him out!’

Azel waited in the living room for Widad to fall asleep so that Siham could finally come see him. He looked around at the décor. There were dozens of paintings in the Orientalist style, all fake, or rather, reasonably well-made copies. What was the point of hanging a fake picture in your home? To remind you of the real one? To fill up space? To show that you’re interested in the way nineteenth-century painters perceived us? Miguel had no fakes in his house, only originals.

Siham fixed dinner, Azel got out a bottle of wine, and they had a pleasant meal. She told him that she’d mentioned him to her employer, who had said that Azel could come to the house as long as she herself was not there. The only thing she had forbidden was alcohol. That evening, it wouldn’t be a problem, since there was no risk of her showing up unexpectedly. They did not make love, but talked quite late into the night. Azel slept on the couch, Siham in her room.

Siham had finally signed up for a class that met once a week in a centre for the disabled in Málaga. She left every Monday morning and returned at the end of the evening. One day, she invited Azel to meet her for dinner and then go to the hotel room Widad’s father always reserved for her. Azel had not been in a good mood. Grumpy, ill at ease, he was smoking too much and unable to focus on anything. For the first time, he spoke about seeing a doctor, perhaps even a psychotherapist.

‘I’m fed up, too: I’m not happy, I live like a leech, and things just got more complicated — Kenza will need to find some sort of job and I’ll have to keep pretending, when I desperately need stability, clarity…’

‘What’s Miguel to you?’

‘He’s important to me, I like him a lot; he has helped me, he’s helping out my family, but people can’t just live off others. Miguel, he says he loves me, that he’s in love, but me — I’m not in love and there are even times when I can’t stand him touching me. I can’t get it up anymore, so the other day he had me swallow a little blue pill, some Viagra, do you believe that? At my age? I’m a whore, that’s what I am, or at least that’s how I feel.’

Siham tried to make light of the situation. Caressing him, she discovered that he couldn’t get an erection.

‘You don’t want to?’

‘No, it’s not a question of wanting, but I’m worried and upset, I’m not getting hard!’

‘It’s just temporary, it’s from stress, and don’t worry about me, I know you’re a man and I adore it when you make love to me. Get things straightened out in your head and be honest with yourself, that’s what counts.’

‘I have to go to a doctor.’

‘If we were in Tangier, I’d take you to El Haj Mbarek, he’s good. Maybe you’re “blocked”: some woman has it in for you, has put a spell on you!’

‘Stop your nonsense, you know that stuff doesn’t exist.’

Later that evening, in his train compartment, Azel slept like the dead.