Many of those girls were in love with Azel, but he discouraged them, telling them the truth about his situation: ‘I’m twenty-four, I have a diploma but no money, job, or car. Yes, I’m a social case, too — just drifting, ready to do anything to get the hell out of here, leave this whole country behind except for some memories and a few postcards, so I’m not made for love, and you deserve better, you should have luxury, beauty, poetry… I already tried to burn up those eight or nine miles between us and Europe, but I got cheated — so I was luckier than my cousin Noureddine, who drowned only a few yards from Almería, can you imagine?’
The girls listened to him; some of them cried. They all came from families where loved ones had tried to leave the same way. Siham, the oldest, admitted that she’d made the crossing only to find the Guardia Civil waiting for them on the beach at dawn in camouflage, as if they’d been at war. She’d been arrested, interrogated, then sent back to Tangier — and a beating by the Moroccan police. Since then she’d come up with other ideas but still hoped to leave and get as far away as possible. She’d been disgusted by what she’d heard said about girls who tried to get a life by emigrating.
‘When a man burns up the straits, they say he’ll find work; when it’s a woman, particularly if she’s pretty, right away she’s going to be a whore! There are well-known networks in the Gulf states, and if you can just get to Libya, where you don’t need a visa, things are all set up to move you on to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. You have to put up with being pawed by those fat slobs; some girls like that, or let’s say, they like what they can get for it. Me, if I ever get to emigrate, it’ll be to take care of my parents. My sister works for two families, in Milan, where old people are abandoned by their own children and grandchildren, so they turn to young women from the Maghreb — Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians — who prepare their meals, accompany them to the hospital, take them out for walks, read to them, in short, give them what they need. It’s good work. It’s what I dream of doing. My sister is looking into how I could get a visa.’
When El Haj put on some music, Siham and the other girls got up to dance. Watching them, Azel felt moved, and wished he could take them one by one in his arms to hug them close. He was happy, but sensed the fragility of such emotions. That evening he made love with Siham.
‘Will you take me with you if you manage to leave the country?’ she asked him afterwards, and then admitted that she was hoping to marry a Frenchman or a Spaniard.
‘Me too,’ replied Azel.
Giggling, she corrected him: a Frenchwoman or a Spanish lady! Azel thought for a moment.
‘What does it matter,’ he said solemnly, ‘as long as I fulfill my dream…’
Siham sat on the edge of the bed and cried. He put his arms around her, wiped away her tears with the back of his hand, and hugged her tightly.
‘In this country, you don’t confess to a woman that you love her; it has something to do with sexual modesty, apparently. I, however, am telling you!’
‘You love me? Then say it again.’
‘It’s not easy.’
‘And what does it mean, to love me?’
‘That I love to be with you, I love to make love to you…’
‘But you can’t be thinking of spending your life with a girl who slept with you the first time you met, a girl who’s not a virgin anymore!’
‘You know, I don’t want to be like all the others here. Virginity, for me, it’s more of a problem than anything else. I don’t like to deflower a girl, it puts me in a panic, all that blood…’
‘Then tell me “I love you.”’
‘Some other time, when you won’t be expecting it.’
Siham lay down on her stomach and began to fondle Azel’s sex with her right hand.
‘Since you love me and aren’t telling me so, I’m going to tell you everything I think!’
And she rattled off all the words for ‘penis’ she knew from reading The Perfumed Garden, by Sheik Nefzaoui,* followed by all the words for ‘vagina,’ emphasizing the vowels and taking pleasure in this linguistic inventory. Then, when she felt Azel finally grow hard, she told him to penetrate her anally.
In Arabic, her command had something pornographic about it, something exciting and at the same time unbearable. Azel lost his hard-on.
‘You’re teasing me! I won’t take you from either the front or behind.’
‘Too bad — at least give me a summery, see-through dress I’ll put on in the hot weather when it’s windy; I won’t wear panties and that way people will see my belly, my crotch, my buttocks, and all the men will keel over in front of me!’
Laughing, they got dressed again. Before they left the room, Azel summoned the courage to ask, ‘Why did you want me to take you from behind?’
‘Girls who want to hang on to their virginity let themselves be taken that way, so there’s no risk. That’s what I did for a while and I didn’t like it at first, it hurt, and then strangely enough I began to enjoy it. Ever since, I’ve liked to change pleasures now and then, but you, you didn’t seem crazy about it…’
‘No. When I was a kid, in my teens, I did it a few times with boys, never with girls. I don’t like it much. I’m sorry about what happened just now.’
El Haj had collapsed in the living room with a girl in each arm. He was snoring, and the half-naked girls were smiling broadly. Unwilling to wake him, Azel offered the girls, who had each received a hundred-dollar bill, a ride home in El Haj’s car.
Afterwards, Azel drove across the city in silence with Siham holding on to his arm. She felt like doing something madcap and impulsive, but Azel was in a gloomy mood, so in the end she went home. At around five in the morning, Azel found himself alone on the esplanade of the boulevard Pasteur, which offered a fairly clear view of the lights of Tarifa, directly across the straits. He took the harbour road, driving past the ruins of the Gran Teatro Cervantes, and decided that as soon as he became a Spanish citizen, he would come back to restore it. At the harbour entrance he was accosted by a policeman in a foul temper.
‘Hey, you! Where’re you going?’
‘To watch the boats leave!’
‘Get out, we’ve got enough problems with the Spanish and those Africans always skulking around…’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to burn up the straits, only watch the trucks get loaded on. I’ve got the right to envy those crates of merchandise! I’d like to be one of them — not be inside one, I’d suffocate — but be one, delivered to a warehouse in Europe, in a land of prosperity and freedom, yes, a simple, cheap pine box, an anonymous crate on which I’d like to have written in red letters: “Fragile,” and “This side up.”’
‘You’re nuts!’
‘Completely! Here, take some cigarettes.’
The policeman helped himself and asked Azel to just leave him alone.
‘Tell me frankly, come on, between ourselves, wouldn’t you like to take the place of one of those crates?’
‘Fuck off!’