I’ll never forget the guy from Marrakech, sent, he claimed, by the Ministry of Water and Electricity to collect a tax to fund the installation of metres, thanks to which our women and children would finally get to wash in running water. He amassed a goodly sum, gave us receipts, lots of forms with the official heading, and that was the last we saw of him. A stocky man with malice in his eyes, smiling and laughing like a hyena, who spoke with the Marrakech accent. He had some sample metres in his van, and we all fell into his trap. He pulled the same scam in the neighbouring village. Never got arrested. Even better: I think I saw him on a Moroccan TV news program in the entourage of a minister of public works. It had to be him: that laugh, his squashed face, the little chin tuft — that was his trademark. The sign of Satan’s spawn.
I am not a wicked man, but I’m a devotee of justice, cannot bear to see it perverted, and I do sometimes dream of vengeance. I would love to see that toadlike thief in the hands of the law, then released in our village where everyone would be waiting to demand their money back. I’d enjoy seeing him stripped of everything and imprisoned for life. Personally, I would have set him out in the sun in a cage with no food or water, long enough for him to learn what a daily ordeal it is to thirst for water and go without. But God will punish him! At least I hope so. Ah, divine retribution! Sometimes it’s magnificent, arriving in time to show that anyone who despoils the poor of what little they have will taste God’s wrath, watched by the victims. Doesn’t happen often, though; seems we have to be patient, learn how to wait while God tests us, and not render evil for evil but believe in his justice, for he avenges the robbed and betrayed orphan, and all who are wronged. If I were to meet that jolly Marrakechi dwarf and have the chance to run him over with my jalopy, would I? The thought of seeing him in agony is tempting, I admit, but I’m losing my mind: bastards are better left in the hands of God.
At the auto plant, the French and Portuguese workers welcomed the day when they could finally enjoy their leisure time, take trips, putter around the house and garden, read, even work on their own projects. They made plans, organised their lives as “young retirees.” As Marcel said: At sixty years we’re barely two-thirds of the way through our lives, so why bury ourselves? Life is for living!
Marcel had arrived in France right after the war; he must have been all of ten years old. A bon vivant, a champion drinker and talker, he was the scourge of the shop foremen. Of Polish birth, a Jew and an atheist, he sympathised with the Palestinian cause and didn’t understand why the Arab states were doing nothing for their brothers in the occupied territories. When Mohammed, who grieved over the Palestinians’ fate, said he couldn’t figure out politics at all, Marcel offered to teach him, but Mohammed wouldn’t budge; even thousands of miles from his village, he still feared the Makhzen. It was in France that he heard about human rights for the first time and learned as well that in his own country men died under torture or rotted in prison without benefit of trial. Marcel kept him up-to-date, telling him, Your country is marvellous, but it’s in the hands of some unsavory characters: the Moroccan police were trained by the French, who taught them how to torture, but the Moroccan system is based on fear, and even you are afraid. I understand you: you’re scared of being arrested when you go back home. It’s the same thing in Algeria, Tunisia — as soon as you protest against the politics of repression you’re done for and they pick you up at the border; that’s why immigrants don’t move around much. You, you keep quiet, and I know that what goes on in your country pains you.
Mohammed remembered the Koranic school and drifted off in distant memories of days when everything was simple, when he didn’t even know there were roads, tall buildings, lampposts illuminating streets where no one lived. The world was as big as his village. He had trouble imagining anywhere else. One’s native land always leaves a bitter aftertaste. Mohammed’s country was dry, bare; it had nothing, and this nothing had followed him even to France. This nothing was important. He had no choice: he couldn’t exchange it for another nothing that was perhaps a little more colourful, better equipped. He made do, with patience and resignation. In the end he’d stopped wondering about all that. What the police got up to in their far-off stations, well, he couldn’t imagine, and his village was light-years away from the city.
Did he want to live like the French? He considered his fellow workers at the plant and didn’t envy their lot. Each to his own life and way of life. He didn’t criticise them but was puzzled by how they treated their parents and children. The spirit of family, as he saw it, was no longer honoured in France. This slippage shocked him. He just couldn’t understand why girls smoked and drank in front of their parents and went out at night with boys. And why did huge billboards display half-naked women to sell perfumes or cars? Most of all, he was afraid for his own family and talked this over with his pals. They sighed, raising their arms to heaven in resignation. What could you do?
One Sunday he invited Marcel home to dinner. It was a holiday, and Mohammed told him, Bring your wife but no wine! Marcel agreed to skip his wine and merrily stuffed himself with the good things fixed by Mohammed’s wife. Marcel liked to tell his friend, Time, it’s us. It isn’t the watch face, no. It’s you who make time: when you close your eyes you’re in the past; when you close them again you project yourself into the future; when you decide to open them it’s no mystery that you’re in the present, the one that’s as thin as cigarette paper. You follow me?
Before going home to their families after their weekend French lessons, some of the plant workers went to see women in trailers and waited their turn shamefacedly. Mohammed had always refused this kind of distraction. He was afraid of diseases and of what his friends and neighbours might say. Something like a curtain of fog half veiled one late-afternoon memory, on a Sunday when boredom had played out in what Mohammed considered a bestial instinct. He’d been dragged along by an acquaintance whose name he had forgotten and who told him, Listen, if you don’t empty your balls now and then, it goes up to your brain and you go blind. Another time he said, Even our religion allows us to empty our balls: you simply write out a document and tear it up afterward. You know, the marriage for pleasure. You get married long enough to fornicate, then you divorce, and you’re all square with God and morality.* Mohammed had chuckled to himself and gone off with his chatty companion.
That Sunday there was hardly any line in front of Suzy’s small apartment. A bit fat, as vulgar as they come, Suzy seemed to have made an effort to exaggerate her appearance, as if that were part of whoring, but she was so nice, so human, that everyone overlooked her heavily rouged cheeks, her nauseating perfume, and the alcohol. Her eyes were never still but always vacant; she was there and elsewhere. She knew her work was unusual, and she too was looking forward to retirement because she’d had it with spreading her legs and squeezing immigrant balls. But she liked the men, even found their shyness and awkwardness touching, she said.