The Last Friend

1

Mamed always used to say, "Words don't lie. Men lie. I'm like words." He would laugh at his own joke, pull a cigarette from his pocket, and slip into the boys' bathroom for a secret smoke. It was his first of the day, and he relished it. We would wait for him, on the lookout for the principal, Monsieur Briancon. We were afraid of him; he was strict and unyielding, as ready to give detention to his own two children as to any unruly students.

Monsieur Briancon was not likely to become any more lenient, especially after his oldest son was drafted for military service in Algeria. This was i960. Algeria was already in the throes of war. Once in a while, Monsieur Briancon would talk with Monsieur Hakim, our Arabic teacher, who also had a son in the army-on the other side, fighting with the Algerian National Liberation Front. The two must have talked about the horror and ultimate absurdity of the war-and about the indomitable spirit of the Algerians, determined to recover their independence from French colonial rule.

Married was short, with close-cropped hair and an intelligent face revealing his wry sense of humor. He had a complex about his small, skinny physique, convinced that girls wouldn't pay attention to him until he spoke. He charmed them with his gift for language, made them laugh-but he was just as capable of making cruel remarks. He was always ready for a fight, so other boys rarely provoked him. We became friends when he came to my defense against Arzou and Apache, two delinquents who had been thrown out of school for theft and assault. One day they were waiting for me just outside the school, trying to bait me, chanting: "The kid from Fez is a swine! He's a Jew!"

In those days, people in Tangier who had immigrated from Fez were undeniably discriminated against. They were known as "the insular people." Tangier still had the prestigious status of an international city, and its citizens considered themselves privileged. Mamed stood between me and the two bullies; he made it clear that he was ready and willing to fight to protect his friend. Arzou and Apache backed off. "We were just kidding," Arzou said. "We don't have anything against you pale-skins from Fez. Like the Jews. We don't have anything against them, but they always seem so successful. Come on, we were just kidding…"

Mamed said I was too white and told me to go to the beach to get a tan. He added that he, too, thought people from Fez had the same traits as the Jews, but he admired them, even though he was a little jealous of their special minority status in the city. He said people from Fez, just like the Jews, were calculating and tight with their money, intelligent, often brilliant; he wished he could be that thrifty. One day, he showed me an article claiming that more than half the population of Fez was of Jewish descent. The proof, Mamed said with a laugh, is that all family names starting with "Ben" were Jewish. They were Jews from Andalusia who had converted to Islam. "Think how lucky you are," he said. "You're Jewish without having to wear a yarmulke. You have their mentality, their intelligence, but you're a real Muslim, like me. You win on both counts, and you're not harassed the way the Jews are. Of course people are jealous of you. But you're my friend. You just need to change the way you dress, and be a little less cheap."

Seen from Tangier, Fez appeared to be a city beyond the reach of time-or more precisely, a city rooted and stuck in the tenth century. Nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed since the day it was built. Its beauty lay in its relationship to time. I realized that I had left behind an ancient era. After a single day's journey I found myself in the twentieth century, with dazzling lights, paved streets, and cars-a cosmopolitan society with several languages and currencies.

Mamed made fun of me, telling his friends I was a relic from prehistoric times. He went on and on about the traditions of old Fez, a city that had always resisted modernization, implying that Tangier was far superior to "that old place" so admired by tourists. Mamed's father, intelligent and cultured, was a prominent citizen with friends in the British consulate. He corrected his son. " Fez is not just any old city. It's the cradle of our civilization. When our Jewish and Muslim ancestors were expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella, they took refuge in Fez. The first great Muslim university, the Qarawiyyan, was built in Fez -by a woman, no less, a rich woman from the Tunisian holy city of Kairouan. Fez is a living museum, and should be considered part of our universal heritage. I know, our treasures aren't so well preserved, but there's no city in the world like it, and for that alone, it deserves respect."

I liked this refined, elegant man. He would lend me books, asking me to pass them along to his son, who had never cared much for reading.

Mamed's house was just a few steps from the school. Mine was on the other side of the city, in the Marshane district overlooking the sea, more than twenty minutes away on foot. He used to invite me to his parents' for afternoon tea. The bread came from Pepe's, a Spanish bakery, and I thought it was delicious. At home, my mother made the bread herself, and it was clearly inferior. Mamed, though, preferred my mother's bread to Pepe's. "That's real bread," he'd say to me. "You don't get it. It's homemade. That's the best!"

2

Our friendship took a while to develop. When you're fifteen, feelings fluctuate. In those days, we were more interested in love than friendship. We all had girls on the brain. All of us, that is, except Mamed. He thought courting girls was a waste of time, and never went to the surprise parties held by the French students. He was afraid that girls would refuse to dance with him because he was short, or not attractive enough, or because he was an Arab. He had good reason to think this. At a birthday party for one of his cousins whose mother was French, a pretty girl had rudely rejected him. "Not you, you're too short and not good looking!"This offhand comment took on exaggerated proportions.

Now all our discussions at recess revolved around France 's war in Algeria, colonialism, and racism. Mamed didn't joke anymore. Naturally, I took his side, and agreed with everything he said. Our philosophy teacher read to us from Frantz Fanon's new book, The Wretched of the Earth, and we spent hours discussing it. At the time, we all sided with Sartre rather than Camus because Camus had written: "Between my mother and justice, I choose my mother." Already very engaged in politics, Mamed said he was reading Marx and Lenin. I wasn't interested, even though I was fiercely anticolonialist. I read poetry, classical and modern.

Mamed became a militant. I fell in love, which bothered him. Her name was Zina; she was dark and sensuous. For the first time, it occurred to me that he might be jealous of me.

When I confided in him, he teased me. I made light of it. But deep down, I knew he didn't like this intrusion into our friendship. For him, it was a waste of time and energy. He readily admitted that he "beat his straw" every day. He used the Spanish word for straw, paja, to mean masturbation, and joked about this with his friends. The girls were embarrassed, and hid their faces, laughing. Mamed took the joke one step further, referring to girls as "exquisite straws."

Our group picnics became a time to get even. Mamed wanted to play "the defect game," as he called it, which involved each of us enumerating our flaws, one after the other, especially private, secret ones. He started with himself to show us. "I'm short, ugly, hard to get along with, cheap, and lazy. If I'm bored at dinner, I fart. You can't take me anywhere. I lie more often than I tell the truth. I don't like people and I like to be mean. Now it's your turn!" He looked at me defiantly. I launched into self-criticism by exaggerating some of my personality traits, which pleased him. My girlfriend didn't like this game, and threatened not to come out with us any more. Mamed silenced her by threatening to reveal secrets he claimed to know about her. This upset me. He told me later this was a good tactic because everyone has secrets they don't want revealed.

The girls liked him, actually. Khadija told everyone she liked him, even when he wasn't talking. We were all relieved to hear this. If Mamed had a girlfriend, maybe he wouldn't be so mean. He wasn't in love, but he saw Khadija on a fairly regular basis.

One day, we were having a picnic and everything was going fine when Mamed suggested we play the defect game again. This time, you had to list the faults of the person you knew best. Poor Khadija turned pale. Mamed started talking about the number twelve. Khadija apparently had twelve flaws that would make any man run in the other direction, and others that would turn him into a woman-hater forever. It was impossible to stop him. We protested, but he was off and running. We were scared, he said. We were cowards. Zina turned up her radio as loud as it would go to drown out his cruel words. Dalida, the Franco-Egyptian singer, was singing "Bambino." Mamed, furious, grabbed the radio and threw it in the water.

"You should listen to me," he said. "We're here for the truth. Why should we encourage the social hypocrisy paralyzing this country? Yes, Khadija has twelve faults. She has at least as many as the rest of us, so what are you all afraid of? She's eighteen and still a virgin. She prefers to be sodomized rather than to spread her legs. She'll suck but she won't swallow. She wears deodorant instead of washing. When she comes, she screams the names of the prophets. She sneaks alcohol. When she doesn't have a boyfriend, she sticks candles up her ass."

Khadija fled, followed by two of the other girls. We joined them, leaving Mamed to enumerate his girlfriend's "flaws" by himself. We were appalled, and vowed never to have another gathering on the Old Mountain again with that monster.

That night, Mamed rang my doorbell. He was in tears. He'd been smoking marijuana, he said, and drinking strong Spanish beer. Would I ever be able to forgive him?

I suddenly saw in him an unhappy young man, profoundly ill at ease, who disliked himself and everyone else, too. He needed psychiatric help. He wanted to try some kind of therapy, but he didn't want people to think he was crazy. He avoided Khadija completely, and generally kept to himself. I was the only person he would see. He trusted me, and made every effort to temper his mean streak. He retained his sense of irony, but used it more wisely. When I ran into logistical problems with my girlfriend-there was nowhere for us to be alone-Mamed told me about the secret affair he was having with a young woman who worked for his parents. He was "beating his straw" less and less, but was afraid his mother might send the girl away. "She's working-class," he told me. "A virgin, of course. We don't speak. I see her at night, and she waits for me naked, ass up. I lie on top of her, spread her ass, and penetrate her, with my hand over her mouth so she can't make any noise. I never ejaculate inside her. I come. She comes. Everyone's happy. In the morning, when she sees me, she looks away, and so do I."

3

During our senior year, when we were preparing for the baccalaureate, Married was more subdued. A small group of us studied together at the Cafe Hafa, and he would join us. He was good at math, which was useful for the rest of us. He sometimes made jokes, but was careful not to go too far. I managed to get him back together with Khadija, with whom he was now in love although he wouldn't admit it. Mamed found me a place where I could finally make love with Zina. "The frantic sessions in the cemetery are over," he said. "From now on, you can use Francois' apartment." Our gym teacher had gone home to Brittany on vacation, leaving the keys with Mamed, who would water the plants and feed the cats in return.

I was ecstatic. Mamed and I worked out a schedule: he used the apartment one day, I used it the next. A red thumbtack on the door meant "do not disturb." When we left, we replaced it with a green one. The summer was great. We met in the evenings to exchange confidences. The apartment was our secret. None of our other friends knew about it. Neither one of us said a word to anyone. At stake were the lives of girls who were supposed to save their virginity for marriage no matter what. We saw the girls in the afternoon, never at night. With Zina, I used what we called at that time "the stroke of the paintbrush." I rubbed my cock against her vagina without penetrating her. I had to be extremely careful. Mamed told me he preferred sodomy.

The summer of 1962 marked our relationship in a way we would never forget. Friendship begins with sharing secrets. Mamed's sister became friends with Khadija and Zina. With her as our chaperone, it was easier for us to go out. Our parents no longer had to worry about us. Mamed and I developed a code to communicate without arousing suspicion. He would say, "Tomorrow I have to water Monsieur Francois's plants. The next day, it's your turn to feed the cats. Don't forget to stop at the fish market for some sardines. These cats are really spoiled."

Although we weren't getting much sexual experience, we were having a good time. One day, Mamed told me he was tired of fucking Khadija in the ass. He wanted to penetrate a vagina, a real one, without guilt or fear. For that, we would need prostitutes. The best place, he informed me, was Ceuta, a Spanish enclave east of Tangier. Spanish prostitutes were known to be clean and expert. Our friend Ramon would guide us. He knew where to go. All we had to do was find the money. Mamed would tell his parents he was going to buy records, since there was not much music in the market in Tangier. His father was a music lover. Mamed would get the money by promising his father the latest recording of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Somehow I had to find a way to get some money from my parents.

Ramon was not one of our friends from school. He had a job, working in his father s plumbing business. We practiced our Spanish with him, but mostly we went to parties together. Ramon was very popular with the girls. He made us laugh because whenever something excited him-especially the sight of a beautiful girl-he stuttered.

So there we were, on the bus heading for Tetouan, then Ceuta. We arrived in the evening. Ramon had the address of a boarding house where we could sleep, and another where we could fuck.

I drank wine for the first time, and thought it was disgusting. At the Fuentes Pension, the girls were sitting downstairs, their bodies on display. You had to pay in advance, fifty pesetas a shot. Mamed chose a blonde with big breasts. In fact, she was a Moroccan with dyed hair. Ramon was a regular. He had his usual girl, a redhead with short hair and flashing eyes.

I went upstairs with a slender brunette with a sad look. I thought she was going to be an expert. She was tired and blase. I came quickly. She heaved a sigh of relief. She washed herself in front of me, and then, when she rinsed her mouth, she took out her dentures. I went downstairs, repelled by the whole thing, and waited for the others outside. Mamed had found a good one; half an hour of fucking, as opposed to my miserable five minutes. His was named Katy. Mine was Mercedes, and I was her fourteenth client of the day. She told me her limit was fifteen. It was a matter of principle. But, she told me, I only counted for half. "You're too young for this!"

Half a client! I was upset, but didn't want to tell Mamed, who looked very pleased with himself. He told me he was satisfied, he felt good, and Katy had promised to see him in Tangier. She had a place there where they could have sex. If I liked, she would bring Mercedes. We could all go to Ramon's house. Ramon nodded in agreement.

No way! I didn't want to hear any more about Ceuta and its whores. I have never forgotten old Mercedes and her false teeth. Burlesque images replayed themselves in my mind. All I could think about was the story of the vagina with sharp teeth. Mamed could tell I was unhappy. He thought it had to do with morality, guilt, or sin. No, I was troubled because I had seen something I should not have had to see, a moment of incredible pathos: a toothless woman wiping her thighs with an old wet rag while I pulled on my pants. Mamed tried to console me. He came home with me, and we spent the evening listening to the radio. I felt like crying. Early the next morning, we went to the hammam in the Rue Ouad Ahardane.

4

Mamed NO longer hid when he had a cigarette, but he never dared smoke in front of his parents. It was a matter of respect. His father was a courteous, reserved man. When I greeted him, I kissed his hand, as I did with my own father. He did not know that everyone called his son Mamed, a diminutive of Mohammed.

One day, a school friend phoned Mamed's house, and his father answered. He did not appreciate his son's nickname, and gave him a lecture. "It was an honor for me to give you the name of our beloved prophet. I slaughtered the sheep with my own hands at your baptism, and here you are allowing yourself to be given this ridiculous name. Your name is Mohammed, and I don't want to hear 'Mamed' ever again."

Mamed told us about this, adding that he was a bad Muslim, and found it difficult to bear the name of the prophet.

Anyway, practically everyone in Morocco was named Mohammed.

During the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast between dawn and dusk, we went to see our friend Francois. He had prepared mushroom omelettes for us. Mamed insisted on having a slice of ham and a glass of wine, too. Not only was he not fasting, he was flouting Muslim dietary laws. The omelette was enough for me; I begged Allah to forgive my momentary lapse. At sunset, we gathered around our family dinner tables, pretending to be weak from hunger and thirst like the others.

The evenings of Ramadan had something magical about them. The cafes were full. The men played a Spanish dice game. The women paraded their children through the streets. The city was lively. Mamed smoked cigarette after cigarette, a brand called Favorites, the cheapest, and certainly the worst for your lungs. On my first trip to France, I brought him a carton of Gitanes. He gave them back, saying he hated good tobacco. He preferred to stick to his Favorites. A few days later, he asked me to give him the Gitanes back, explaining that he hadn't wanted to get used to them, since he couldn't really afford such a luxury.

Mamed and I were given more or less the same amount of pocket money. Our parents were not rich. Mamed was always calculating his expenses. With his taste for cigarettes, wine, and magazines like Hot Jazz, he was always overspending. I loved movies, and found a vendor in the medina who stocked unsold copies of film magazines and newspapers. Everyone called him "Monstruo," because of his physical handicaps. He was twisted in every way possible, but he ran his small shop expertly. No one dared to make fun of him, apart from his nickname, which he had learned to accept. "So what if I'm all twisted, I can still screw your sisters!" he would say. He bought unsold copies by the kilo and let us rifle through the piles. There were all sorts of French magazines, from the highbrow Cahiers du cinema and Les Temps modernes to the lowbrow Saint les copains.

The two of us swapped books and magazines. Mamed made fun of me because I liked Cahiers du cinema, which he considered elitist. He preferred the Cine Revue, and a magazine that had stories with pictures of naked women. We had intense debates; our other friends felt excluded. They saw us as intellectuals, interested mainly in France. They were right. When we weren't talking about sex, we were discussing culture and politics. Despite our differences, we felt close and complicitous. Neither of us ever made an important decision without asking the other. But oddly enough, we never talked about our friendship. We shared most of our lives with each other, and we were happy. It was our classmates' jealousy that made us realize how serious our friendship was.

From time to time, Ramon would join us, commenting with amusement on our closeness. He said it was unusual, that we were closer than brothers, and he wished he could be a part of it, but the fact that he was a manual laborer made this difficult. He was wrong. It certainly did not stop us from seeing him when we wanted to pick up girls.

5

After the baccalaureate, our paths were destined to diverge. With his scientific bent, Mamed wanted to study medicine. He dreamed about it. It was his calling. He got a scholarship and left for Nancy, in the east of France. I went to Canada for film studies. For the first few months, we wrote to each other a lot, then less frequently, but we spent that summer together on the beach in Tangier, just like in the good old days. We fell right back into our same routine: flirting with women on the beach, listening to music in the evening, and talking endlessly about the state of the world. We even covered the walls of the American School of Tangier with graffiti, with slogans like down with American imperialism, go home, and VIETNAM WILL CONQUER.

That was when Mamed told me he had joined the French Communist Party. First he harangued me with hackneyed Communist rhetoric (he seemed to have lost his sense of humor again), then read Lenin to me, whom he called "the genius." He smoked just as much as before, and said how happy he was to get back to his old, unexportable Favorites. His political activism monopolized most of his time. I was bothered by the fact that he was not at all interested in my film studies. The one time he mentioned it, he launched into a diatribe: American films helped destroy the culture of the Third World, John Ford was a racist, Howard Hawks was a manipulator, and Raoul Walsh was a one-eyed visionary.

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 humor again), then read Lenin to me, whom he called "the genius." He smoked just as much as before, and said how happy he was to get back to his old, unexportable Favorites. His political activism monopolized most of his time. I was bothered by the fact that he was not at all interested in my film studies. The one time he mentioned it, he launched into a diatribe: American films helped destroy the culture of the Third World, John Ford was a racist, Howard Hawks was a manipulator, and Raoul Walsh was a one-eyed visionary.

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."

6

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.

7

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.

8

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.

9

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.

Mamed decided to go back to medical school in Rabat, the capital. I decided to give up film studies to enroll in the Faculty of Arts, and major in history and geography. "It's the writing of the Earth," one of our professors said, explaining the word "geography." He added that the Earth also writes the story of humanity.

Student activism was widespread, but Mamed and I no longer wanted to be involved. We were considered "veteran conspirators," and the secret police watched our every move. Mamed trusted no one. That didn't stop him from spending time with a guy who was short, ugly, and dirty, but intelligent. This guy was curious about everything, and he went out of his way to help Mamed. I had a bad feeling about him. He was too friendly to be honest. I asked him about his job. He was vague and secretive. He claimed to work for an advertising company. In fact, he was really a cop. We found this out later when the Ministry of the Interior appointed him head of the censorship bureau. The whole thing made Mamed sick. He couldn't get over it. He was mad at himself for having been taken in. "To think he talked to me about Kant, Heidegger, film, and art, plus he was such an ardent critic of the government and the police!" Later, this spy made a career in intelligence. His dream was to be a writer. He wrote a few lines of poetry, published them at his own expense, and distributed them to government agencies. On a Moroccan television show, he was introduced as a promising young Francophone writer.

The undercover agent had clearly been jealous of our friendship. Mamed listened to him without taking him seriously, but continued seeing him, until the guy made the mistake of criticizing me and my family.

10

Mamed married ghita even before he finished the course-work for his medical specialization in pulmonology. His parents were upset, and they asked me to do my best to convince him to wait. They considered me Mamed's best friend, someone he held in great esteem. Not surprisingly, I had no luck with Mamed. He was stubborn, and became resentful whenever anyone tried to make him change his mind. This rigidity annoyed me. We avoided talking about it, because when we did, he lost his sense of humor and even his ability to think straight. One day, after a discussion in which he had to admit he was wrong, he became unusually angry, saying: "Sometimes I wonder why we're friends, since we never agree about anything." I didn't take this comment seriously. He wasn't making any sense. For once I was the one to bring up his faults, something he never hesitated to do with me. We never seemed able to give each other a break. But somehow things were never even.

Mamed and Ghita s wedding took place as planned. I was the couples closest friend. Ghita, a pretty brunette, was an unemployed sociologist. I knew Mamed wanted to have a family; he had sown his wild oats. But I was surprised that he decided so quickly. He told me it was not love at first sight. It had developed slowly-slowly but surely. He had a theory about married life that was a mixture of cliche and real reflection. For him, love blossomed through daily cohabitation. He cited his parents as an example. According to him, it was better to choose a virtuous woman rather than a great beauty who was arrogant and difficult. So Mamed settled down, and I was the only friend he continued to see on a regular basis. He had changed. He had gained weight, and he became irascible.

Little things made him angry. He no longer had any patience. Our time together was not as relaxed and easy as before. It seemed to bother him that I was still a bachelor.

I had no desire to settle down and marry a nice girl just to avoid being alone. When I met Soraya, it was love at first sight, an earthquake, a tempest in my heart, an avalanche of light and stars. Unlike Mamed, I chose beauty, which came with both arrogance and fickleness. Mamed refused to voice his opinion, claiming the issue was too personal to be discussed, even between close friends. Against the advice of my parents, I married Soraya. Her mere presence made me deliriously happy. She was intelligent and shrewd, volatile and vivacious. I had one year of peace and happiness with Soraya. She never argued with me, and she was good to my elderly parents. She was sweet and loving in public, and even became friends with Ghita, which pleased Mamed. He wanted to hire Soraya as an assistant in his clinic. I refused, thinking this might someday jeopardize our friendship. Mamed finally agreed with me, and instead hired a young nurse who wasn't particularly gracious but very efficient.

After finishing my degree, I was appointed professor of history and geography in Larache, a small coastal fishing town eighty kilometers south of Tangier. I commuted to work, as Soraya's parents had lent us an apartment in a building they owned. They refused to rent it, claiming that Moroccans were unreliable tenants. My wife worked as a nurse in the local Red Cross Society. We lived a petit-bourgeois existence, with limited horizons and limited ambitions. Once in a while, Ramon came to visit. He had married a Moroccan woman and converted to Islam. He now called himself Ab-derrahim, and he spoke Arabic. He said, "Ramon, Rahim- it's practically the same thing." But to us, he was still Ramon.

11

Mamed and I had a weekly ritual: we met in a cafe every Sunday morning between eight and nine. First we discussed current events, then turned to gossip. From time to time, some of our old high school classmates or teachers would join us. We always avoided making political observations. We knew that police informants lurked among the cafegoers. Those were the days when Morocco lived under a sort of martial law, under which opponents of the government were arrested. Some disappeared forever. Faced with their families, the police would pretend to look for them, knowing, of course, that another branch of the police had taken care of them for good. We were haunted by this idea of disappearing forever, vanishing into thin air, reduced to a mound of earth without being officially declared dead. Lost and never found. Lost and never buried. I remember a woman who went crazy, wandering the streets with a photo of her son, refusing to go home until she found him. She slept on the sidewalk in front of the police headquarters. One day she vanished. People said the police had made her disappear, just like her son. We lived with this fear in our guts, but we never talked about it.

Mamed and I shared books and records. Some evenings we would have a drink together, either at his place or mine. Mamed liked only cheap whisky, which he drowned in soda water. These days he smoked brown-tobacco Casa-Sport cigarettes. His famous Favorites had been taken off the market, due to a documentable increase in lung cancer among those who smoked them. 1 got by with a little bit of Galavuiline, a pure malt whisky I bought under the table from a Jewish grocer who got it from Ceuta.When Ramon joined us, he drank Coke. Like a lot of converts, he was serious about his religion. He no longer drank rioja or ate Spanish ham. We teased him about it, and he laughed.

Mamed and I talked, argued, criticized each other, engaged in wordplay and dark humor. He was much better than I was at verbal banter, but I knew more about film and poetry. These exchanges were supposed to keep our minds active so we wouldn't fall into the lethargy most people in Tangier suffered from. Especially in those days, when everybody lived in wariness and fear. A diffuse fear, without name or shape.

Our wives saw each other, but they never became close friends. Mamed and I rarely talked about our marital problems. We avoided it because we knew instinctively that nothing good could come from such discussions. He intuited my difficulties, and I his. We remained supportive of each other, but had no need to say it or to show it publicly. There were usually no subjects that were taboo in our conversations, but we must have been thinking of Bob Marley's misogynist "No Woman, No Cry." In Morocco, as everybody knew, it was the men who made the women cry. They cried in silence. Women did not have the right to complain. In friendship, as in love, everyone needs an element of mystery. This was less true of me than of Mamed, who loved secrecy, perhaps a weakness acquired during his Communist days.

12

Our friendship was about to undergo a five-year hiatus. Without any stain to its purity, it just went underground. It happened naturally, without either of us deciding anything. It was simply the result of physical separation.

Mamed was offered a job with the World Health Organization, and after some hesitation, he finally took it. He agreed with me that it would be good for him to leave the familiarity of Tangier to advance his professional life elsewhere. So he left for Stockholm on a trial basis, to see if it would suit him. As he had left Ghita behind for the time being, we made sure we saw her regularly, and frequently invited her to our home. While Mamed was away, I found a replacement for him at his doctor's office. I did the bookkeeping, paid the bills, and generally watched over his family's needs. I bought a notebook in which I kept track of all the finances to the nearest cent, informing Mamed of every transaction. He called often, and I sent him letters with every business transaction clearly detailed.

The next summer he came back, having decided to sell his office and stay in Stockholm. He sold his medical practice to my nephew, who had just finished his degree. My older brother paid Mamed's asking price without quibbling. Everything seemed to go very well. However, I began to realize that Mamed was obsessed with money, whether out of fear of having too little or mere avarice.

With my best friend gone, I felt completely alone. Our letters and telephone calls became less and less frequent. I became depressed. My wife didn't understand why I missed Mamed so much. She made occasional jealous scenes. She kept telling me to open my eyes to reality. I thought they were wide open.

One day, Mamed called from a telephone booth and asked if I was alone. I said yes. He confessed that since they had gone to Sweden, his family life had become a living hell. Ghita would become hysterical to the point of violence. I was her favorite target. She accused me of having cheated Mamed on the sale of his practice. She was sure I had exploited our friendship in order to get a good deal for my brother. Her parents had supposedly informed her of the "real price," and had even advised her to sue me for taking advantage of the situation for personal gain. I was stunned, deeply hurt. Mamed said that it was all a pretext on his wife's part to break up our friendship. I told him that my wife was jealous, too. I understood then that our relationship, built over so many years, was in jeopardy. I had fooled myself into thinking that our friendship was indestructible, that nothing could come between us.

Later, I made the mistake of repeating this conversation to my wife, who took advantage of it to pour out a torrent of emotion. You are so naive, she told me. This guy has used you. He has always been self-interested. His friendship has never been sincere. His wife is right to accuse us. We gave her the opportunity to humiliate us. One good deed is often repaid with a bad one. You should know that, since you've been swindled so many times by people you considered your friends, people who took advantage of your kindness. It's a weakness, when it all comes down to it. It's special form of stupidity. Now you have proof that your best friend isn't a true friend. He pretended to be on your side, but in fact allowed himself to be manipulated by his petty, jealous wife. You need to get rid of these so-called friends. You tell them all your secrets. I bet you even tell them about our arguments, our sex life. You can't keep a secret. You're riddled with vanity. Ah, the respected teacher, the distinguished pedagogue, the old leftie who has fallen into line with the corrupt majority! Well, thanks to Ghita, now we know. Mamed is not your friend. He is jealous and bitter, he's a slave to his wife, he does just what she tells him to, and you believe everything he says. Youd be better off taking care of your own family, saving some money so that I can go to France and see a gynecologist who can help me have a child…

13

I had married soraya for her beauty and intelligence, but when she realized she could never have a child, she turned into a different woman. Our life revolved around her fertility problems. She read everything she could, wrote to specialists in France and America, tried diets to encourage ovulation, went to faith healers, and even had a telephone consultation with Jacques Testard, who had just succeeded in creating "Amandine," the first test-tube baby. She decided to try in vitro fertilization. Her parents were firmly opposed, saying this was all in the hands of Allah and we should never contradict his divine will. Her parents' opinion mattered, since they were the only ones who could afford to pay for this expensive procedure. In order to lay to rest any doubt, I underwent examinations to be sure the problem had nothing to do with my sperm. Without invoking religious principles, which I didn't have anyway, I tried to convince Soraya to adopt. I discovered that Islam forbade adoption, allowing it only in the case of a child who had been abandoned, in order to give the child a chance in life. But according to Islamic practice, the child would always remain the fruit of an adulterous relationship, and would never have the right to bear the name of the adoptive family. It had to do with laws related to heritage and incest. Still, on a practical level, corruption made anything possible. We could obtain false papers, documents, family certificates. Even if Soraya agreed to adopt a child, I told her I wouldn't do anything illegal.

The birth of Adel, Mamed and Ghita's first child, was traumatic for Soraya. She made a heroic effort to overcome her jealousy, yet it took nothing but the slightest remark or reminder to set her off-a pregnant cousin, a neighbor's inquiry, a television ad for diapers. She would become depressed all over again.

I don't know whether my friendship with Mamed suffered from this. Distance and infrequent contact had preserved our bond. When Mamed called to ask how I was doing, he talked as if we had seen each other the day before. I avoided telling him about Soraya's fertility problems, just as he avoided discussing his marriage. Mostly, we talked about cultural events. He recommended books and films he was able to see before they came to Tangier. I caught him up on the local gossip. He liked to know what was happening while he was gone. It was as though Tangier belonged to him.

A city of seduction, Tangier lashes you to its eucalyptus trees with the old ropes left by sailors at the port; it pursues you as if to persecute you; it obsesses you like an unrequited love. We talked and talked about Tangier. We knew that without our city, our lives would be meaningless. We needed to know what was going on there, even though we knew that nothing really earthshattering ever happened. Tangier was like an ambiguous encounter, a clandestine affair hiding other affairs, a confession that doesn't reveal the full truth. It was like a family that poisoned your existence as soon as you got away from it. You knew you needed it, without being able to say why. Tangier, the city that had given birth to my friendship with Mamed, harbored an instinct for betrayal.

I told Mamed the latest gossip, and I was amused because I knew how much he missed it all. Brik had married Ismael's widow. Fatima had been abandoned by her husband after an affair with a young French official. The Regnault high school had been repainted. The Cervantes Theater was still run down. Allen Ginsberg had passed through town to see his friend Paul Bowles, and they were seen smoking marijuana at the Cafe Hafa.The French-language newspaper, the Journal de Tangier, had changed hands. The Lux Cinema was closed for repairs. The Mabrouk had been demolished in order to build a new nondescript building in its place. Tangier had not had a governor for six months, and nobody noticed. King Hassan had promised to visit Tangier, but no one believed him.

Hastily constructed new buildings had gone up, though they were uninhabited, and no one knew who owned them. The American Consulate had closed. Riots had broken out in the working-class area of Beni Makada. Barbara Hutton's house had been sold. Yves Vidal had given a big party in his palace in the casbah, while his friend Adolfo had celebrated the construction of a swimming pool on the roof of his house with yet another memorable dinner. Tennessee Williams drank so much one night that he fell asleep on a doorstep of the Rue Siaghine. I caught a glimpse of Jean Genet at the Cafe de Paris. Francis Bacon bought every kind of alcohol he could find at the Epicerie Fine market. A turf war among drug dealers had left three dead at the port. Momy was getting thinner and thinner, driving around town in a pink Cadillac with an overly made-up blonde in the back seat. I saw Hamri in a cafe, and he assured me that his paintings would be worth a fortune after his death. Ramon was still in love with his Moroccan wife, and had become a true Muslim, to the chagrin of his Spanish family.

The Hotel Minzah had been sold to an Iraqi. There was supposedly an Interpol warrant out on him. The Cafe de Paris had new furniture; the Porte Tea House was still closed. A new radio station had started up. The Rif Hotel was barely staying in business. The Colonnes bookstore was still in the same place. So was the Claridge, though the cafe was not as good as it used to be. The wind from the east had been particularly strong this summer. Gibair no longer flew from Tangier to Gibraltar. There were only four Indians left in the whole city; two of them had a shop in the Socco Chico, in the medina, and the other two sold watches on the Boulevard Pasteur in the new part of town. The Siaghine church had closed its doors. The synagogue nearby was still open, but had only a few visitors…

Tangier has lots of new neighborhoods, buildings constructed with no planning, no trees, gardens, or parks. If you saw that, Mamed, you would be upset. King Hassan came through town without stopping; his train dropped him off at the port, where he took the boat to Libya. People waited for him all day long, in the heat, burned in every sense. Elizabeth Taylor celebrated her birthday in Malcolm Forbes s palace in the casbah. And me? What about me? Well, I'm still teaching. I got a small promotion, five hundred dirhams more a month, sent to a new school. Now I'm at a teacher's training school in Tangier.

14

I never celebrated MY birthday, but Mamed always sent me a card and a present, usually a record or a book. We were born the same year; he was three months older. When he moved to Sweden, the tradition ended, which seemed perfectly normal to me. It was part of the change in the tone of our friendship. It had become both more essential and less a part of everyday life, on standby, waiting to prove it had not lost its intensity. One day, Mamed called asking me to check on his sick mother as soon as possible. He wanted me to see if her condition really warranted a trip back from Sweden. He told me that his brother often exaggerated the state of his mothers health, to make him feel guilty-the sort of thing that happens in families. Would I go and see her, talk to her doctor, and report back to him? He had more confidence in me than in his brother; I was more objective. He said he would call at the same time the next day. He added that he had spoken with his father, who was much less dramatic about it all, but perhaps because his father worried any time Mamed got on an airplane.

In fact, his mothers condition was extremely worrisome. Her diabetes was out of control. She barely ate anymore, but her blood sugar was high. She had all kinds of complications, she no longer recognized anyone, and the doctors couldn't do anything more for her. I told Mamed to come home immediately. He arrived two days later. At that point, his mother was a little better, and he looked at me as though I had misrepresented her condition to get him to come back to Tangier. Mamed was his mother's favorite, and she was waiting for him to come home so she could die in peace. She told him so, and then died in his arms. Mamed hugged me and cried, asking me to forgive his doubts about my judgment.

Ghita, seven months pregnant, had remained in Stockholm. I took care of the funeral arrangements as if they had been for my own mother. Mamed was profoundly affected, crying and expressing guilt about having been absent for so long, something his brother did not hesitate to point out. He stayed with us during that week in Tangier. Something about him had changed, though I was not sure what. He still smoked as much as before, and he drank a lot. He had found some cheap cigarettes in Sweden, had become thinner, and spoke passionately about the Scandinavian welfare state. It was a real democracy, he said, without corruption, without lies from the government, no beggars in the streets, very few alcoholics. The Scandinavian sense of civil rights was the stuff of dreams for an Arab or Mexican, he told me, and immigrants were given the opportunity to learn Swedish, to have decent housing, and to be a citizen like anyone else. What shocked him, he said, was that despite all this, the Swedish still complained about their system. They talked about the corruption in industry, for example, or complained that social security did not take care of everything. They would point out that old people were not treated well in the hospitals, citing the story of an elderly couple so unhappy with their medical care that they wrote a letter of complaint, then got in a boat and drowned themselves off the coast of Gothenburg. "Imagine if all the sick people in Morocco did that. There would be no one left!"

And yet he missed Morocco. "I miss the smells, the morning scents, the sounds, the nameless faces we see every day, the warmth of the sky and the people. I'm really torn. My working conditions are ideal. I'm well paid, even though more than half my salary goes to taxes. My child is being raised in a country with real justice, where he has the right to disagree with the government, to speak freely, to believe in God or not as he chooses. He is free, but is he happy? Maybe I'm transmitting my doubts to him. Ghita is very happy. She's made friends; there are lots of radical women who do charity work-she volunteers for an organization that helps exiles.

I'm the one who's dying of boredom. I miss Tangier. I hate to admit to this ridiculous nostalgia. You know what I miss the most? Our discussions in the Cafe de Paris and the Cafe Hafa. I'm not the only one. Whenever I meet other Moroccans in Sweden, the only thing they talk about is Morocco. They think nothing has changed. It's nostalgia. They find spices in the Iranian and Turkish markets and make tagines."

"Moroccans in Sweden are never satisfied," he continued. "They forget that Sweden has given them a chance to remake their lives. But I'm sure if they came back to Morocco, they wouldn't last more than twenty-four hours. They are completely screwed up. I don't want to be like them, so I'm going to come home at least twice a year. I have to find a balance between that country, with its ideal democracy and this one, with its widespread corruption. There has to be a balance between Sweden 's justice and this country's sleazy compromises, between Scandinavian solitude and invasive Mediterranean communality. It's a question of bridging the gap. The trick is not to lose your cultural identity while you take advantage of real democracy. Remember, the Swedes lost their prime minister, Olof Palme, precisely because he was so accessible to ordinary people. He was gunned down walking out of a movie theater. How different is that from Morocco? Here even an obscure deputy minister would never be seen in public without his bodyguards. Traffic stops; sirens blare. These people despise ordinary citizens."

15

Before he left Tangier, Mamed went to see my parents. He examined my father, who was having trouble breathing, and prescribed some medicine, wondering out loud whether it would be available in Moroccan pharmacies. If not, he offered to send it from Sweden. My mother gave him a box of little cakes she had just made, insisting: "They're good, especially in the winter. Take them with you. I hope you like almond. And look, take these two rolls, fresh from the oven. Homemade bread is good. I'm sure your mother used to pack food for you. I've always done that for my children. It's important to eat well. Come back and see us. If you need anything, remember you have a home here, too. Come here, my son, so I can embrace you and give you my blessing." Mamed's eyes filled with tears. He hugged my mother and promised to return.

We received a package from Mamed with the medicine for my father, a pretty cashmere shawl for my mother, and a pen for me. Soon after, Mamed's second child was born. He called him Yanis, telling me over the phone that it was like Anis, Arabic for companion, but it was also the Greek name for John. "He's a little Swede who will make his life here. It's different for me. I'm too old to start over, so I go through the daily motions, do my job well. I no longer try to bridge the cultural gap between Sweden and Morocco. I'm tired. I'm still thinking about whether or not to have Yanis circumcised. It's supposed to be better in terms of hygiene. Now don't get any ideas from those old Fez families who kidnap little boys and have them circumcised without their parents' knowledge. I'm only telling you this because I know you could do it. By the way, say hello to Ramon for me."

I finally convinced Soraya to adopt a child. We went through the usual procedures, legal and illegal. It took six months, and then, one day, my Rif Mountain friend Azulito (his nickname came from his blue eyes) brought me a birth certificate and another legal document confirming the adoption of our son, Nabil. We had to lie, telling everyone that Soraya had had a difficult pregnancy, and that she'd been confined to bed rest for the last six months. We didn't tell anyone he was adopted. That was the price we had to pay for Soraya to reclaim her zest for life, her inner peace, her easy disposition. I told Mamed the truth. He sent Soraya a magnificent bouquet of flowers.

The next summer, Mamed came to see us with gifts for Nabil. He had changed a great deal physically and coughed all the time, claiming it was air pollution. He had good cough drops, he said, but he had left them at home.

Once again, we fell right back into our old summer routine-meeting at the Cafe de Paris in the morning and Cafe Hafa in the afternoon. We talked and joked about everything. But one evening, while we watched the sun set on the Spanish coast, he suddenly became serious. "I think I've made a mistake," he said. "I never should have left Morocco for Sweden. I'm lost. I've seen how you can live differently, and in many ways better than here, but it's not my culture, not my traditions. My wife and children have adapted better than I have. I'm depressed there, unhappy here, dissatisfied everywhere. The whole thing has been a failure. I'm not well. My children don't speak a word of Arabic, even though they're supposed to have learned it at school. They think of Morocco as a vacation place.

I don't want to grow old in Sweden. I think I'm going to come back. They need lung specialists here. What I would really like to do is retire early and come home. I doubt my wife and children will join me, but we all have our own paths to follow." He punctuated his words with a nervous, dry cough. I had given up talking to him about his health. He was certainly well qualified to know what was going on inside his lungs.

16

Soraya seemed happy, and she no longer got angry over little things. Nabil was growing up in a peaceful household. I had no complaints about my wife, but I still felt the need to have a secret affair with Lola, an Andalusian woman who worked at the Spanish consulate. I didn't feel I was betraying Soraya, and had no guilt whatsoever. Lola looked as if shed stepped out of a Modigliani painting. She lived in her own world. She said she did not belong to anyone, and that she preferred romance to friendship. In fact, her sensuality attracted many lovers. I first met her with Tarik, a physical therapist, probably the only openly gay Moroccan in Tangier.

Well aware of her charms, Lola was always the one to make the first move. In the beginning, I tried to resist. I liked her, but I had long since given up on sexual relationships that weren't going anywhere. Yet I felt a strong desire to respond. Why mire myself forever in the pseudo-comfort of a routine life? After a while, I realized that I had gone along out of a desire to imitate Mamed, not to upset him. I had decided to remain faithful to my wife and not give in to carnal desire. Yet I was bored with the routine of it all, the nights Soraya and I would have sex, the nights she had headaches, the nights I went out with my male friends. I couldn't stand this routine any more. The temptation of risk and adventure became too great. I didn't say anything to Mamed about this when I gave him the latest news from Tangier. When he asked about me, I told him everything was fine, Soraya was fine, there was nothing to report.

A sort of mutual modesty had emerged between Mamed and me. We no longer joked about our private lives. Sex became something we never talked about. I was tempted to tell him about my affair with Lola, but I knew he might be shocked, so I said nothing. It was impossible to know which of the two of us had the upper hand in our relationship. We complemented each another; we needed each other. We both acknowledged this, and we took a certain pride in it. Like me, Mamed preferred friendship, a bond we chose, to the family bonds imposed on us. I had no reason to complain about my older brother, but we were not friends.

Lola liked to make love everywhere but in the bedroom. She had spots all over the city, as well as on the Old Mountain, where she liked to have sex. The first time, we did it in her car. I hated it. It reminded me of the frustrating sessions with Zina in my youth. Lola had thought of everything: condoms in the glove compartment, cloths dipped in eau de cologne, towels, even a club hidden under the seat in case we were attacked. She was an expert. I left her car stiff and disheveled, feeling like I had just ridden the bumper cars at a carnival.

The second time, she took me to an abandoned hut near Donabo Park. She pulled a blanket and all the other necessary accoutrements out of her car. She was highly aroused. When she came, she cried out in Arabic, "Hamdoullah," and in Spanish, "Gracias a Dios," thanks to God. This made me laugh. I had barely caught my breath when she turned over on her stomach and told me to take her from behind. That evening, my knees hurt.

Another time, Lola arranged to meet me in the office of the Spanish consul, who had gone back to Madrid on family business. She was naked under a transparent jellaba. "Fuck me here, on the boss's desk, on top of his files and old newspapers. Don't touch anything, or move anything," she said. "Here. I want you. Shut the door, but don't close the curtains. The light is beautiful."

With Lola I traveled through time and space. She gave me enormous pleasure. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed making love. As in our youth, I thought of Mamed, who must have experienced the same feelings. Once we had shared a girl. It was a game. Afterward, we asked which one of us she preferred. She laughed and said it was like making love with the same man, which we took as proof of our virility. The sharing stopped when we both married. The time for games and swapping was over. We entered a serious phase-that is, a boring routine. It was to escape this routine that I had my affair with Lola.

Every night, I came home exhausted. I went to bed thinking how much energy I needed to satisfy this insatiable woman. I joined a gym, less to exercise than to have an alibi in case Soraya started to get suspicious. I began to enjoy the intrigue of my double life. No one knew about it. I called Lola at her office every other day at 5 p.m., let the telephone ring three times, hung up, then called her back. "Will you fuck me tonight?" Lola would ask. 'Td like to do it in a Turkish bath, so try to reserve one just for the two of us. Unless youd like me to ask Carmen to join us…"

She knew how to excite me, to unsettle me, to push me toward dangerous new paths. Now I was obsessed with the idea of doing it in a Turkish bath. I didn't know Carmen, but apparently she was a divorcee who had not had sex for a year and was ready to do anything to end her long stretch of abstinence. Physically, she was very different from Lola, with big breasts and a small ass.

Carmen met me instead of Lola. She took my hand and led me back to her place. After Lola's less conventional tastes, I rediscovered the comfort of a large bed. She asked me a favor. "Let me smell you. It's been so long since I've smelled a man. Don't mind me; this is what I've missed." She stuck her nose in my armpits, breathing deeply, then rubbed her nose along the rest of my body, lingering a long time between my thighs. I let her do it. I was excited. She writhed in my arms like a wounded animal, holding me tightly. "I don't want to take Lola's place," she said, "but we're very good friends, and she gave me this as a present. This is the first time I've done anything like this. I was a faithful wife, but when my husband left me for our young housekeeper, I became depressed, and I didn't want to touch a man. I touch myself every evening, but nothing can replace a man's skin, his smell, his sweat, his breath, his caress, even if it's clumsy. You've made my friendship with Lola even stronger. I don't know whether two men would have done that out of friendship. I doubt it. Men are much more selfish, less courageous, and they never share anything. Thank you and good-bye. I have no intention of seeing you again. This was a just a deal I had with my friend. I'm going to find another man and live normally again."

17

These clandestine affairs restored the vigor and sexual appetite I had almost lost. I asked myself whether Married would have appreciated what Lola had done. He might have when we were younger, when we reveled in fantasy, when our illusions were still intact, and when our imaginations offered flights of escape.

Our friendship had become too serious. Mamed, who in the past had been such a joker, a master of wordplay, always ready to make us laugh, had definitely changed. After his mother died, he came back to Tangier often. He came alone and stayed with us, and he drank too much. He had become extremely sensitive, got angry easily, and continued to smoke cheap, disgusting cigarettes.

One evening, when Soraya was already asleep, Mamed started to cry. He blamed himself for having left Morocco, for having been away during his mother's illness. He started to confuse everything, drunk from all the whisky. Perhaps he was also suffering from depression. The next morning, he had no recollection of what had happened. He told me I had made the whole thing up to make him feel guilty, to destroy his mood. I said nothing.

During his stay, he learned that an apartment on the fifth floor of our building was for sale. He went to see it, and decided to buy it then and there. He called his wife, who was less than enthusiastic about owning a place in Tangier, but she ended up agreeing. The apartment belonged to Soraya's parents. They sold it to Mamed for below market price. They knew he was my best friend. Mamed went back to Sweden, asking me to take care of the interior decoration and the furniture. Soraya and I worked to get the apartment ready, sending Mamed photos of rooms as they were finished, along with fabric swatches for the sofas and the curtains.

The apartment would be finished by summer. I put up the money for the remodeling, which involved borrowing from my bank. Mamed did not know about this. I waited until several days after his arrival in Tangier to show him the bills. He coughed more and more these days, and his face had taken on a strange cast. His wife told me that Mamed had refused to stop smoking and drinking, despite the advice of a colleague, a professor of medicine who worked in the same hospital. When I presented Mamed with the bills for the work on the apartment, he pushed them away, indicating that this was not the right time.

Our two families spent the summer together, sharing every meal. One evening, I arrived late; dinner was waiting. Mamed shot me a reproachful look. Even my wife never looked at me in such a cold, suspicious way. After dinner, he suggested we take a short walk on the Avenue d'Espagne. There was something dark about him. Something had changed in the way he spoke and thought. "I've studied the bills you gave me. I even showed them to Ramon. What you've done is wrong. It's unworthy of our relationship. For a long time I've felt that something like this might happen. I wasn't sure you were capable of abusing my trust this way. Don't interrupt me. Let me say what's on my mind."

He paused, as if he were about to give up the idea of saying anything, and then he blurted out: "You took advantage of my being gone to cheat me. You did it as though I were some kind of idiot, probably telling yourself, 'He's far away, he's in Sweden. He's not even Moroccan anymore. He won't suspect anything. He'll swallow everything.' But I'm more Moroccan than you are. I'm suspicious of everything and everyone. Actually, in Sweden I learned that money is money, and there's no shame or hypocrisy in talking about it. It's not like our charming country: 'No, no, let me pay. I insist! Look, we're not going to be like Germans who split their restaurant bills.' No, in this country we're generous, hospitable. We'll even go into debt to avoid seeming poor. We sell our animals so we won't lose face in the village when it's time for a religious feast. Well, I'm not who you think I am. I've finally understood. Your friendship is worthless. You've always looked out for yourself. I've tried to tell you that friendship is not a series of profitable little calculations. But you and your wife and your in-laws had the nerve to sell me the apartment at thirty percent above the going rate, pretending to give me a good deal because we were friends. And you were an accomplice. You forgot to mention the commission you made on the deal."

Mamed stopped talking, then continued hammering away. "Don't interrupt me. Don't say anything. I know what you'll say, that in the name of Allah and the prophets you're an honest man, that you even lost money on the whole deal, that I should thank you for taking care of everything. Well, I let you do it as long as I thought you were my friend, not a traitor or a thief. No, let me finish. You can talk later. Wait until I've said my piece. Everything between us has been ruined. First it was your wife, bothering us with her jealous scenes. You were always complaining about them. You would even call me at the hospital when you knew I was making my rounds. You would leave a message. 'Please call your friend in Tangier.' And I did! I called you back. What an idiot!"

Mamed was out of breath, his eyes red. "It was only later that I realized how cheap you are, that nothing came out of your pocket without careful calculation. That brought me back to our childhood, our youth. When we first met, I protected you. I liked you because you seemed fragile. You never had any money on you. After school, you hung around so you could have an afternoon snack at my parents'. You claimed you liked the bread from the Spanish bakery better than your mother's, but you were really trying to save money. I knew you had a problem, but I told myself that one day you'd get over it, you'd be a decent guy, generous, unselfish. But you stayed the same, cheap and opportunistic. When it came to political commitment, you lied, too, skipping political meetings on the pretext that your mother was ill. You were never very brave. You always arranged things to appear to be someone you're not. People always knew they couldn't count on you! And now these bills!"

There was a brief pause in Mamed's monologue. "Those bills are all fake. Are you going to tell me that the carpet came from Ceuta, and the fabric for the sofas came from Gibraltar? Did you go there? No, you sent Ramon, the newly-converted good Samaritan. He did this little job for you, for me. I should thank him. But Ramon wasn't in Ceuta, and certainly not in Gibraltar. I've checked the prices, and they've all been upped by twenty to thirty percent. Yes, my dear friend, the one I used to play with, in whom I confided my romantic adventures, it turns out that all this childhood friend wanted was to make a couple of thousand dirhams behind my back. You thought, 'He's an easy target. He's a doctor, he has better things to do than check these bills.' But don't kid yourself. I listened to my wife, and we conducted a little investigation. What you've done is shameful. I guess you decided to reimburse yourself for the computer you bought me for my fortieth birthday. You said, 'Learn how to use a computer. It's amazing'. At the time, I thought it was an expensive present, but you had it all calculated in advance to cheat me.

"I was blind, refusing to listen to my intuition, or my wife's. I believed everything you said. To think we served time in prison together for our ideals, for the values we shared. You should never have gone to prison for your ideals, since they are totally insincere, a lot of hot air, a lot of talk, not serious at all. You're a phony. Don't try to defend yourself. To think I always wanted the best for you, that I put your interests above my own, above those of my wife and children. You were the friend, untouchable in my eyes, whom I preferred to my own brother. I was proud of you, especially when you rejected the easy life of bars, friends, prostitutes, and more bars. I thought you had settled down, that you never cheated on your wife. That's what I thought. Now I know not only that you betrayed my trust, but that you lead a double, maybe even a triple life here. Sure, you told me a little about that Spanish woman, but the others? Anyway, now I know about them, too. Rumors? Don't interrupt me. Here in Tangier, everyone knows everything. Nothing is secret. You can try to hide things, to take precautions, but in the end everyone finds out. You might say that your sexual transgressions are not my business; that's between you and your wife. But they're low and common. They've opened my eyes to all the rest of it.

"And the rest is huge. It stinks. The little tricks in order to spend the least money possible, to be two-faced. With you, there's always another way out, so you can work the situation to your advantage. But it's not really possible, my friend. You are careful with your health: you don't smoke, and you barely drink. Even sex is carefully calculated according to what you think your body can handle. Everything is measured. You don't get sick, so you don't have to pay a doctor. It works for you-you're in good health, which is not my case. I cough when I get out of bed, when I talk, when I go to bed, and even when I sleep. I drink a glass of whisky every night. I am killing myself slowly, methodically. But I'm happier than you are. No, leave me alone. Don't try to help me. It's fitting that I would be coughing during our moment of truth. I've emptied my lungs to tell you how much you disgust me, how much I regret these thirty years of illusions. Don't forget anything I said. Get away from me. Don't try to help me. My family and I are going to sleep somewhere else. This is a final good-bye. I never want to hear your voice again. I never want to hear anything more about you or your family. This is it, forever."

18

When I receive a severe emotional shock, my body reacts physically. My saliva dries up, I feel something bitter in my esophagus, and then I start hyperventilating. I have to sit down and drink some water. Mamed left me, coughing so violently he was staggering. I walked into La Valencuela, the ice cream parlor of our childhood, and asked for a bottle of water. The owner, who knew me, sat down beside me and asked if he should call a doctor.

"No," I replied, "Dial 36125, my house, and let me speak to my wife." I must have drunk a whole liter of water. I was still sweating, but my mouth was no longer dry. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach, and I worried that it would come up and choke me. I was pale, my vision was blurred, and I shook as if I had a fever. Soraya arrived, and threw herself into my arms, in tears. "What happened to you? Did somebody mug you? There's no blood, you're not wounded, but you're as pale as a ghost. What happened? Talk to me. Call an ambulance!"

I stopped her from calling anyone. There was no point. It was just an emotional shock. It was not serious, just a house in ruins that had collapsed on me. I was full of dust, the roof had caved in on me, there were fallen beams. It didn't feel bad at the time. I didn't realize what was happening to me. Everything was collapsing around me. First some stones, then a whole wall, then parts of doors, after which I was buried in the rubble. It was like an avalanche of snow, like a fall into the void, surrounded by chunks of hard ice, and yet I couldn't find the ground. I heard words, but I couldn't call for help. I had the impression that some strong hand kept me from opening my mouth. So I continued my freefall into the void, while I sweated and my mouth became dry.

When Soraya and I got back to our apartment building, there was no trace of Mamed and his family. They had gathered their possessions and left. I noticed that there were traces of blood in some spit in the bathroom sink. The house smelled of medicine. My wife held me in her arms and cried. I did not want to speak, to discuss what had happened. In fact, I could no longer speak. I had lost my voice. I had only one desire, to record on paper what Mamed had said in those last hours, to write everything down, without worrying about order or logic. I spent the night writing. Soraya understood that I should not be disturbed. When morning came, I closed my notebook and slept until the afternoon. I must have lost at least a kilo. The sweating continued even during my sleep. I took a shower, put the notebook in the safe, and watched an old Hitchcock film about somebody falsely accused of a crime, played by Henry Fonda. Truth hung by a thread between light and darkness. Daily life seems simple, whereas in reality it is quite complex. All it takes is for appearances to become intertwined with emotions, and you become the center of an invisible, hidden vortex swirling you into a nightmare.

I knew the Hitchcock film by heart, and I let myself be swept away by the story, in which anyone, however common or anonymous, could become the victim of a bureaucratic error, a terrible injustice. It was my story.

The next morning, I got my voice back. I went to the cafe for breakfast as usual. I saw Ramon, who was worried by my state of mind. He asked so many questions that I ended up telling him what had happened. He was an upright man, warm and sensitive. He listened without saying a word. I saw the shock on his face. He could not understand what had happened. Neither could I.

19

A few days later, I felt the need to write to Married. I drafted several letters. I wanted to avoid sounding pathetic or spiteful. Above all, I knew it would be a mistake to try to respond in a legalistic, point-by-point way. He knew his accusations were false, but why did he feel the need to make them? What lay behind this sudden drama? What was he really trying to say? I wrote the following:

Dear Married,

Tell me about the real state of your health. Your cough sounds bad to me. But as a lung specialist, you know this better than I do.

You and your family left, vanishing from the apartment like shadows. I am not angry with you. I would just like to know what happened, and why you picked this particular evening to try to destroy me. I refuse to defend myself and to prove to you what you know better than anyone else. I was hurt more by your state of mind and body than by what you said. We know one another well enough not to make up stories, or to stage inquisitions in public. Our friendship has a strong foundation. Your accusations are unworthy of our long history together.

I will let you rest. When you feel better, call me, or tell me when I can call you. We need to be able to speak calmly so that everything is clear and unambiguous.

I embrace you as always.

Your faithful friend

Mamed's response took less than a week to arrive. A curt, brief letter arrived in a recycled envelope:

If you consider yourself my friend, you should know that I am not yours.

I want nothing further to do with you or your family.

I have examined the bills and done the accounts. You owe me a total of 34,825.53 dirhams. This is the difference between what you really paid for the renovation and decoration of the apartment, and what you made me pay. Deposit this sum tomorrow at the Ouladna Orphanage.

Do not call me again. Do not write to me again. I have put the apartment in Tangier up for sale. There you will find the computer and printer you gave me to try to buy my friendship. They remain in good condition. I barely used them.

Farewell.