Your last
afternoon unfolds. Beginning in that newly remodeled bistro across from
Les Invalides. Will you have the onion soup or la crepe d'epinard?
Gaz or eau naturel? You're always lost in the dialectic...
'Monsieur,' demands the waiter. Yes, alright then, you say pointing to the
menu, this and that. While the waiter scratches it down, you scratch your
head: if the city finally does something about air pollution next year and
restricts parking, will I keep my car at home or at work? Will I visit my
mother this weekend, although her dementia is so maddening, or my son whose
romances are so tiring. And what to do about that young woman who came in
this morning for an interview—wearing a veil.
Someone should tell
these people that we separate church and state here. As a graduate of Science
Po (1968), I can tell you what this country needs, and to the woman in her
little white veil, I can say, without a second's thought, without any reservation
or guilt, “No, I will not hire you. It has nothing to do with Islam,
or your sex certainly—I prefer women—or where you come from. Or
even if you are Salafiste; we all have our delusions. But not in
this company. It's too distracting. We can't have all these little personal
agendas. By the way, I'm assuming by your accent that you are at least second
generation. One would think you must know better. And I have to add, it's
a small thing I suppose, but if you insist your religion is 'scientific'
and then deny that Man descends from apes, then what do you expect? Perhaps
you can play the role of a post modern Atala, yes, but keep it to yourself.
This is not like America. This is fondue not stew. You can't just say, 'I'm
here, I deserve all these things. This is my house.' No. if you want something,
you have to earn it.”
Nineteen
hundred kilometers to the south, one hour ahead, 200 hundred years behind,
completely out of mind shot, Mohammed is delivering his fare to the grand
gare in Meknes. The two of you have no connection, you could barely imagine
each other. You are in your new ivory white Powerbook, he is in his little
pale blue petit taxi, an old 4-cylinder Uno. If he hustles, he can net 15
dihrams an hour, times 10 hours a day. What is that, less than 100 euros
a week, working 70 hours? Times his parents, two brothers, a sister, and
half a dozen cousins. Times the rest of his life—driving, driving,
driving—past corner cafes, those smoky confabulatories filled with
whole generations of stilled men, waiting, weightless, sipping tea, watching
the mint float like diseased anatomy in formaldehyde.
Mohamed has such a
tender, endearing face, doesn't he? And the whitest teeth. No matter how
old he becomes he will always look like a boy. And in 30 years, when he's
your age, he will still have that doe-eyed look of sadness.
It's mostly this country,
the 'culture of despair', as the academics in Rabat like to say. He would
give anything to get out. He's taken some law courses, he speaks French
(he listens to all the French singers), and he can say in English, quite
convincingly, “I have studied the Law,” or, “Would you date
me?” The problem is he's always dreaming. He often says to his passenger,
“Where do you want to go again?” And there aren't that many places
to go to in Meknes, between the two gares, MacDonald's, and the local tourist
destination, Moulay Ismail's version of Versailles, with the ghosts of 10,000
heads still droopy-eyed on the decaying red limestone ramparts.
Mohammed goes right
on, entranced, incanting to his blue angel to appear, to step out of a magician's
mouth with his immigrant visa. And then to beam him away to a small cottage
in Canada or, as a distant second choice, to a basement apartment that opens
out into the lemon yellow fragrance of Seville. He'll be someone's chauffeur.
He'll meet a beautiful and talented woman, like the blonde doctor from Oxford,
America that appeared in the back seat one night. She lived in 'Mississippi'
and he repeated the word over and over. Someone like that, he thought, and
she'll have money and help him—he always knows how to get women to
help him. Maybe they'll get married, they probably will, and he'll go to
law school, join a firm and represent immigrants and famous criminals, and
one day he'll be famous himself.
In the meantime, where
does all his pittance go? Most of it goes to his older brother, Salim. Salim,
the crème Chantilly of the family, and not just because he's the
eldest. He doesn't have Mohamed's imagination, but he has what Mohamed will
never have—he has will power. Four years ago he snuck into southern
France, then down through a human manhole into the suburbs of Paris. The
problem is that cost a lot of money, it was a huge risk, and now everyone
is waiting for the return on investment.
Salim's success caused
much resentment with Mohamed, who always considered his brother too mercurial,
too much of a con man, too much an ass kisser. But Mohamed always does what's
required. He's the catalyst for change in his family, the true caretaker.
Mohamed's younger
brother, Hicham, teaches in a noisy, dirty 3rd floor internet school in
Casablanca. Nobody in the family understands what he does, but he's the
one who found a mafia lord that gets harrags into Europe. He has
been the family's operating system for hope.
Mohamed's father minds
two dozen sheep in the forests above Azrou, an old crossroads in the Middle
Atlas. Once, caravan trains with 10,000 camels loaded with salt came plodding
through the town, from morning until night. Now, Azrou is the dry cleaner
for drug dealers in the Rif looking to get the spots out of their money.
The new boulangerie, for example, is all drug money. Mohamed can tell you
and he could have had that life too, but he has always resisted obvious
evils.
Mohamed's mother is
invisible, no more than a forgotten riddle. Still, her blood should not
be doubted; it runs in torrents back to Kahena, the Veiled Queen of Jerawa,
that most feared and fabled of Berber warriors. When Kahena vanquished the
Arabs in 700, this was their lament:
More
cruel than all the others combined,
She gave our virgins to her warriors.
She washed her feet in the blood of our children.
But let's
get back to you and women in little white veils. You haven't forgotten
your weekend in Fez, have you, or how you fell in love with the black, long-fingered
masseuse in the hammam? What a touch she had. Not a part of your body she
missed. And then what about Amzil, who appeared in the Sofitel bar so serendipitously.
Actually, a referral, wasn't she. But the most beautiful figure you'd ever
seen, what skin, and absolutely spectacular nipples. 'I want to be a baby
all over again,' you told her. 'I want to be your baby, and hoard all your
milk to myself.' What a wild and exotic weekend that was. Spent tons of
money, but it was worth it. And after being with her you finally understood
the country, as though having gone to the University of Amzil at Nipples
made you the next Bernard Lewis.
“That said, I
like the Maghreb.” Isn't that what you're always saying? “I wish
France had done a better job with it, but frankly I don't know what the
answer is. The truth is they're where France was in 1794. There's just no
sense of community. They always talk about ummah, but it's all nonsense.
Ummah, ummah, ummah. For them ummah is their
immediate family and a cousin or two. Everyone else is not in the ummah.
I told that to a pharmacist one day in Fez. I have this awful gout and he
wouldn't give me the correct medicine. We got in this terrible argument.
He was ranting on in front of all his customers: 'Look at what you've done
to the world, you have no humanity'. The old colonialism mantra. I said
to him, very calmly, 'Monsieur, now please tell me about your humanity.
What about the 15,000 homeless children living on glue in the streets of
Casablanca? It's worse than Sao Paulo. Is that what we taught you?' He had
no idea what I was talking about. 'Tell me about how you treat young women
who are pregnant outside of marriage, how the police lay in wait outside
hospitals, and what happens to orphans? And tell me about all the unheated
schools in the Atlas and corruption from one end of the country to the other.
Well, it's not your will. And you are all Sunnah, no? What about the Shiites?
How do you feel about them? And how is it you've turned this country into
a whore house in the name of tourism? What are the women of Agadir if not
the private stock of Saudi princes. Don't tell me les annees noires
are finished; it's just a different shade of noire.”
Muhamed
suffers from depression. It runs in the family. His mother has it, his
brothers, his sister. They don't even know they have it. But Mohamed knows,
he found out a few years ago, through one of his fares, that doctor from
Mississippi.
His father doesn't
suffer from it, but if he did no doubt his Berber nature would overcome
it. What strength that man has, what perseverance. And when he brings his
sheep and goats to the marche during Eide he always gets the highest price.
He's meticulous in the way he cares for them, forever standing along the
road side, even in July when nothing moves. You could blow on a blade of
grass with all your might and it would not move. He's the same, unmovable,
immovable. You might think, 'now that man must be a sun-baked idiot
to be able do that.' And when it's snowing horizontally, he's out in the
moor, where the cold collects in your shoulders like carcasses in the charnel
pit. He reads skies and sheep, and jins, the way you once read Zola
and Verlaine, and once—albeit, a long time ago—he knew how to
conquer the world and he did. Even in his generation, illiterate as it is,
he remembers hearing about 'the three kings', and his great uncle was a
goumier blown to heaven at Verdun. But he, himself, could care less,
he wants little and expects nothing.
However, his sons
are another matter. Even 500 years later, in some generations the blood
is still too hot to touch. And why? Not because of what blanched history
is served up in unheated schools by unpaid teachers. No, this kind of hatred
boils at a lower flame than names and dates on a blackboard. Still, if there's
just one date and one name that a famished mind atop a bad stomach can't
digest it's 1492 and Queen Isabella. That memory alone is cause to blow
up a train station. Not to mention the thought of that 'little' gothic cathedral,
the profanity inside the Great Mosque of Cordova.
Crème Brule
or the crumble? The one is more sugar; the other has fruit. The one
has eggs, which is protein, which is bad. The other has whip cream, which
is partly dairy, which is almost good. If it were lite, but it's not...
What to do? Alright, the crumble and a cafe au chocolat. Something for the
chill. Do I really have to go Place Vendome this afternoon? Yes or no. You
look at your watch. Yes, I suppose. You catch the waiter's eye from across
the room and write air on your hand. For a moment the mind gathers around
the cannons across the street, black iron order within the chaos of blowing
snow. You think of Napoleon in Russia and in his tomb within tombs.
“But here is
my point,” you were saying just the other night, forever riding through
dinners in the 7th arrondisement on your hobby horse. “You saw that
slanderous story in the foreign press the other day about Ecole Normale
Superieur. Has any worthy president not gone to ENS? And here it is under
attack by these so-called 'progressives' insisting we are obsessed with
intellect. Of course, let's enroll the minorities in ENS, regardless of
ability, to soothe the childish sensibilities of these castratis
in academe and Le Monde. Let's put the country in the hands of gypsy
mediums and Haitian babalaos. And all this because of a few burned cars.
What those numbskulls should fear is that one day the highest point in Paris
will be the top of a mosque, and the only way to stop that is hold on to
reason. Without that no civilization—no life at all.”
You look around the
table and all the eyes applaud, all the lips curl approvingly. You are the
only one who tells it the way it is.
Who in
Azrou would have guessed that Salim, the tall slender, ever smiling
Salim, the family's hero would find his way into the minds of the people
he did. First, to the harrag lords from Siddi Moumen and Toma, and
then, by one of the last peteras to make it into southern Spain;
from there, to Marseilles, and finally to the gangsteres des catacombs.
Salim has never been
political, neither socialist nor islamicist. He knows little about Les
annees de plomb. He never heard the late king say—and would not
have cared if he had—that “in the long term, in the course of
a reign... there are often obligations which are incompatible with [people's]
rights.” He's never heard of shadow ministers, the Masonic society
of the 'red flag', or the notion of the markzen still ruling from
behind white curtains.
So it's all the more
odd he would do this. Who among his family and friends, those that knew
him to be a promising soccer player, a good-natured, good-looking boy, and
a particularly promising history student, who would have imagined he could
end up in the city of light, and that just as Mohamed is pulling up to the
Grand Gare in Meknes for the fifth time today, Salim is passing the entrance
to the Le Muse de Rodin, and slipping down into the metro to blow
himself up.
And where
are you? Post crumble, standing on the quai on your way to Place Vendome,
unaware of the crusades around you. Across the tracks a young woman stands
in a long dark blue over coat. She looks defiant. Look at that expression.
What a beauty she is, God help you, and you wonder about her life and where
she's going and what her lover must be like, she looks too fresh to have
a husband, and what it would be like to spend an afternoon with her, how
you could show her a thing or two. How you could undo her. You become transfixed
by the distance from your quai to hers, by the tracks aimed at opposing
destinations, by all the metaphors between you, and yet even as you go down
each possible road with her, all the lives you could live with her, happy
and not, you know what silliness it is, what an old man's phallicy and fallacy
it is.
As always you can
see the whole world, all the possibilities. Nothing could surprise you now,
you have mastered the art of expectation, and yet here you are jumping back
and forth between sentimentality and what, reality? brutality? Thoughts
within thoughts within thoughts. What a shame, how natural, and how hopeful
all at the same time.... Is Mariano a 34 C or D? Should I go down to Cabourg
and visit my mother, the demented, or my son, the fragmented?
Then, just as the
train pulls in someone grabs your hand. Your first thought: this is a woman's
hand, small and warm, my ex-wife perhaps, an old girl friend, or Mariano
out of nowhere, 'thank god', you think, and you turn expectantly, the whole
afternoon is about to blossom. Oh, but it's not her, what disappointment.
Instead, a young brown man, black-eyed, thirties, a small red scar under
his mouth and the head-shaved look of a condemned man. Clearly from the
Maghreb, and he's smiling. Do I know him? Is this someone who works for
me? He looks vaguely familiar. Your instinct is to withdraw your hand. But
he's a good-looking young man and you wonder, why is he smiling like that?
I must have given him something.
The train doors open,
passengers descend like a breaking wave, and suddenly this man's grip is
iron tight. You glance at him and then in the very next moment something
has happened, hasn't it? Something has happened—and why? A strand of
psychopathology caught in the man's teeth? Or is it this ethno-centrifugal
force of maddrass-induced memories the pundits keep talking about, the addictive
glory of Hasan-i Sabba's holy killers of Islam, the Nizari Isma'ilis.
No matter, something
has happened and you are still right where you were, but not in the space
as you were, you are spread out is the only way to express it. Like Coltrane's
jazz or Coleman's. Definitive is not the word, and yet.... And yet what
a wonder it is, how you can cross through these panes of existence and non,
and the truth is Mohamed in his little green Uno, rattling around Mekness
in a day dream, is closer to death than you are right now.
© 2006
Mark MacNamara
