‘So: this man whose papers are not in order — is also selling hashish!’
He spent the night at the station, lying sleepless on a bench next to a Latino bum who stank. Azel thought about his mother. He called to her; she didn’t hear him. He knew she couldn’t hear him. He saw her sitting on the terrace of their house, looking at the sea, thinking of the day when she would rejoin her children. She’d had enough troubles in her life to want to end her days in a happy country with her two successful children at her side. Everyone has a dream… Azel’s was broken beyond repair. For the moment, he had to find a way out, something that would convince the police of his good faith. Hard to plead innocent with fifty grams of hashish in your pockets. So he had to put his cards on the table. In the morning he asked to speak to someone in authority, an officer with whom he could negotiate.
‘Negotiate! Negotiate! This is a police station, not a court of law! You’re a lousy drug dealer hawking fake watches and you want to negotiate? Just who do you think you are?’
The officer finally arrived. He spoke Arabic.
‘Assalam Alikum! Issmi Khaïmé, atakallamu larabiya wa a’rifu al Maghreb. Madha turid ya Azz El Arab? Bonjour, my name is Jaime, I speak Arabic, I know your part of the world, the Maghreb. What do you want, Azz El Arab?’
‘Mina al mumkin an ou inoukum. I could be useful to you.’
Jaime abandoned the Arabic and began speaking in French and Spanish.
‘Useful? You want to turn informer?’
‘Well, more precisely, I could supply you with information about certain Islamist groups.’
Jaime left to make a phone call, returning with another officer, evidently higher in rank than he was.
‘You think you can be a police informer just like that? It takes time: building trust, showing results, being tested…’
After an hour, during which Azel felt the atmosphere change, a third officer joined them.
‘How can you prove that we can trust you?’
Azel got out Abd al-Wahhab’s card and handed it to him.
‘This man tried to get me to join a movement, a kind of group to defend Muslim interests in Spain. He talks constantly about revenge, about Isabella the Catholic, Andalusia, the return of Islam to Christian and infidel lands. I’ll be meeting him again next week. Give me a chance.’
That’s how Azel became a snitch for the Spanish police. He saved his skin but sold his soul. Perhaps in a good cause. Actually, he didn’t give a damn whether he was on the right side or not. Despair had hardened his heart. The next day, he felt rather sick, with pins and needles all over his body. Tiny insects were running up and down his limbs, gnawing at him, and he felt paralyzed. He wasn’t suffering terribly, but he did see his right foot detach itself and get carried off by a thick column of black ants, after which praying mantises tore off his other foot. He would have liked them to carry all of him away like that and bring him a completely new body; maybe he would recover his virility, and experience once more the pleasures of his former life. Azel’s face felt like a stone mask. When he tried to stand up to go look in the mirror, he couldn’t budge. Something was holding him back, a powerful exterior force that clamped him to the earth. Entirely enveloped in a transparent blue veil, a lovely Moroccan woman was now holding the mirror out to him. Smiling, dancing, she invited him to join her. Remaining absolutely still, Azel watched her; this was the first time he had ever felt such a change in his awareness of the world. He thought of Kafka and The Metamorphosis, which he’d never read, but he remembered a wonderful lecture his philosophy professor had given on the subject.
I’m going to transform myself, become someone else — that would be a good thing, after alclass="underline" I’m changing from one person to another; I add a bit of treachery, a touch of denunciation, even if it’s for the right cause, and which cause is it, anyway? I mean, really, it’s disgusting to be a spy for the cops.
He needed a little time to get used to his new duties. His mind was almost down to its last scruples. Gone, no forwarding. Gone for good. Gone to die. He was planning to visit the city cemetery. If I die, bury me here, in this land I dreamed about so much. I wouldn’t like to be interred in the earth of the Marshan Cemetery, I know it much too welclass="underline" the dead folks are our neighbours, and we know all their visitors. Dying, what does it matter…
One morning, when he got up, he felt the need to do something positive. He went to the post office to send a telegraphic money order to his mother. Then he phoned her to announce that he had a new job, that Miguel had gone to America for a long time, that he himself was doing well and would soon visit her in Tangier.
When his mother began to speak, her tone was melodramatic.
‘You see, my son, I don’t know how much more time God will grant me in this life, so you know what obsesses me: to see you married, to see your children playing in my house and making noise, lots of noise… I would not like to die without experiencing such wonderful moments. You know, your cousin, lovely Sabah, she’s waiting for you, she just refused a rich and quite promising suitor; Sabah thinks about you, her mother confirmed that to me yesterday. Come, take a wife and give me grandchildren. May God grant me life and your presence at my deathbed.’
Azel said nothing beyond the conventional phrase: ‘May God grant you health and may your blessing protect me.’
Protected … he didn’t feel protected at all. How had he managed to get himself mixed up in so many conflicts? He saw himself at an intersection, unable to cross; in the rush of cars coming from all directions, he felt like a headless puppet. After everything he’d lived through that past month, how could he possibly find himself? How could he find peace? There was someone inside him driving him to sabotage his own life.
Possessed. That’s what his mother would have said about him.
They’ve cast a spell on you. They’ve hunted you. The evil eye, hatred, jealousy. There, my son, is the explanation for everything that is happening to you. You cannot imagine what malice springs up in people, in life, whenever anyone stands out from the crowd; they try to hurt you: you’re handsome, intelligent, successful (you managed to leave, in any case, and make a fine career for yourself in Spain), so you unleash ferocious hatred, dreadful envy — oh, we’re all persecuted by the evil eye, and I know, you young people today, you don’t believe in it, you think logic is everything, that nothing happens beyond what you see, but you must learn to see what doesn’t show itself, because even our prophet Lord Mohammed recognized the existence of the evil eye. Jealousy can wreak havoc, just look at what befell that poor Hanane: she’s beautiful, educated, from a good family, and was going to marry an engineer, from an important clan, so everything was ready, even the invitations were printed, and you know what happened to her? No, she didn’t die: worse! She was abandoned by her fiancé, who preferred to marry her aunt! So the evil eye, I know it well. My son, don’t forget to read the Koran: God will protect you. Know that from where I am, far from you, I never stop blessing you, you and your sister.
37. Kenza
ALERTED BY THE EMERGENCY SERVICE of the Red Cross, Miguel emerged from his voluntary seclusion to sit at the bedside of his wife, who had tried to commit suicide. Kenza was frighteningly pale, with dull, empty eyes. An unhappy love affair. A cruel disappointment. She had suddenly lost all desire to live. When she did not answer Miguel’s questions, he felt that her silence was the result of some specific trauma, that something dreadful must have happened. Miguel searched her handbag and pulled out a book of poems, Human Landscapes, by Nâzim Hikmet. He looked at the photograph Kenza had used as a bookmark. It showed her next to a tall man, darkly handsome, with a moustache. They were standing in front of a restaurant called the Kebab. Miguel wondered if Kenza might recover her power of speech if she could see the man in the picture again, and with the doctor’s encouragement, he began to search for him. It took Miguel some time to find the Kebab, a modest hole-in-the-wall squeezed between a dry cleaner’s and a cellphone store. The chairs were dirty and the tables were covered in plastic. An old man was nodding behind the counter, but when he saw Miguel arrive in his beautiful coat, he jumped as if the king in person had just walked in. Miguel narrowed his eyes; there was a poster on the back wall with the picture of some actor or singer, and when Miguel looked more closely, he thought he recognized the man beside Kenza in the photograph.