Uncle Abdelkader was a real character. In terms of physique, while Driss wasn’t exactly a giant, his little brother seemed like a dwarf beside him. He had a funny protuberance on his forehead, not in the middle, like the prayer bump that regular mosque-goers took pride in, but on the left side, which meant it’d been there from the time was he born. Furthermore, he was as deaf as a doorknob. How had that come about? It was just one of the many mysteries about him.
He had also been saddled with a nickname, to the point that most people who knew him had forgotten his real name was Abdelkader. To them, he was Touissa and nothing else. But why Touissa, diminutive of tassa (cup)? When one said tassa, the first thing that came to mind was the expression “hitting the cup,” which in popular parlance in Morocco was equivalent to draining a glass (or rather many), hitting the bottle, getting hammered, going on a bender, or to put it plainly, getting drunk. What? Did Uncle Abdelkader drink alcohol? Once the feeling of indignation had passed, we listened to Radio Medina, which let nothing slip past it and had the habit of making a mountain out of a molehill. They would tell of how people usually beyond all suspicion, whether or not they were of some standing, would find any pretext to slip out of the Medina and go to the mellah, where they would frequent cafés called “cantinas,” where they served kosher wine and mahia, which was made by Jews from the Sefrou or the Demnate. Besides the profits they were reaping, the publicans took pride — and delight — in seeing the faithful of the dominant religion partaking in the pleasures that were permitted under their own religion. The radio also said that one didn’t need to go as far as the mellah since there was a cantina in the immediate vicinity of the old city, not far from Bab Boujeloud, where very respectable fellow Muslims could “hit the tassa” with the most exquisite brews. Ah, those Nazarenes, taking over the country and running it as they liked wasn’t enough for them, they had to go ahead and corrupt the souls of the faithful and damn them to the torments of hell!
Was Touissa mixed up in all that? It was all well and good for those with full choukaras, for whom such extravagances were only a trifle. But how could Touissa, who was poorer than Job, afford it?
Another mystery surrounding this good-natured man was his eternal bachelorhood, which at his age — he was well into his thirties — stood out as an anomaly. Hence the stories about him circulating in the family. Though only God is all-knowing, it seemed Touissa had disappeared from Fez for more than a year. Some eyewitness accounts placed him in Marrakech, where he had gotten married and even fathered a child. Then one day he’d reappeared, empty-handed, filthy, dressed in rags, and infested with lice. When pressed on the subject of his adventures, he made out as if he hadn’t understood the question. Whenever someone wanted to extract some detail or other, Abdelkader broke out in hysterical laughter as if he’d just been tickled — he was extremely sensitive to tickling, and knowing his weak point, the children took great pleasure in exploiting it. Basically there was no pinning him down on the subject.
Afterward Abdelkader continued to run away, but for shorter periods at a time. He always came back in the same sorry state, at which point Ghita would look after him as if he were one of her children. She’d clean him up, clothe him, and let him stay at the house until he got on his feet and was ready to go back to work.
Touissa’s activities were yet another bizarre facet of his character. Unlike his two brothers, he hadn’t followed in his ancestors’ footsteps and become a saddlemaker, a trade that had been passed down from father to son for many generations. Instead, after who knows what byway, he had taken up the craft of making slippers. A profession he only practiced in an amateurish way since at any given time this champion of laziness contented himself with a small presence in the Sekkatine souk, and in exchange for some services, his brothers looked after his basic needs. Yet not strictly all of his needs, since our man had a penchant for smoking kif. In order to procure it, he was obliged to take up irregular employment at a workshop in the Bine Lemdoune neighborhood. Namouss had seen him there once or twice. Now and again, Touissa would set himself hard at work in that tiny dark hole that he shared with a number of other craftsmen. While he was completely deaf, he must have had eyes like a hawk in order to be able to sew by hand in such conditions, and he did so with such skill and dexterity that his babouches were put on sale even in the Sebbat souk, where I can assure you such fine workmanship was held in extremely high regard by the shopkeepers. On another occasion, Namouss had come across him absorbed in a ceremony that he had elevated into an art: the preparation of the kif. Touissa would put a bunch of the herb on a plank he’d placed level on the floor. He would pluck the leaves from the stalks one by one and throw out the seeds. A little mound would begin to pile up, which Touissa then would take to with an extremely sharp knife, chopping up the leaves and reducing them to tiny pieces, at which point he’d sprinkle a small quantity of tobacco on it. After which comes the fine-tuning as he’d sift the mix and eliminate the chaff. The finished product is then poured into a leather tobacco pouch, at which point the tasting begins. Touissa would fill up the bowl of his sebsi pipe, light it, and close his eyes, drawing in a deep lungful. Then he passed the pipe along to his nearest colleague, who would take a drag and pass it on to the next. The experiment seemed conclusive since the man who must have been the master craftsman sent an apprentice out to the café to fetch some tea. But Namouss couldn’t hold on for much longer. The smell of the kif mixed with the odor of the chemicals used to treat the products in the workshop was making his head spin. With a few hand gestures, he made clear he had to leave. Happy that Namouss had come to see him, Touissa pulled out a coin that shone in his hand.
“Take it,” he said, “and give my regards to the lady of the house.”
Uncle Abdelkader was the subject of so many stories. The latest, for instance — just to send a smile his way, where he now lies next to his brothers in the Bab Guissa cemetery — occurred when Uncle Si Mohammed’s family was celebrating a great occasion, to which Namouss’s family had been invited. After the meal, the help began to fidget in a most unusual way before being overwhelmed by an outbreak of hysterical laughter. Touissa, who started chuckling as soon as he was addressed, began rolling on the floor and almost chocked on his own giggles. He was forced to leave the house so he could calm down and catch his breath. As the night wore on, he had yet to return to the house. Everyone came to the conclusion that he had left for good and the gates of the house were shut. In the meantime, the mystery of the mad laughter had been solved. Namouss’s aunt, who was rather stuck-up, had chosen that night to reveal an unexpected character trait: her mischievousness. She had put some maâjoun, a powerful stimulant, in the food in order to — in her words — make the monkeys sing and laugh. Well, well, the prank provoked mixed responses from the monkeys. But what worried them the most was what had happened to Touissa. Where might he have wound up in his condition? The following morning, the whole affair came to a happy — and quite comical — conclusion. When the gates were opened, Touissa was found fast asleep on the threshold. . with a large watermelon under his head. Why a watermelon, and how had he gotten his hands on one at such a late hour of the night? A small wonder that was added to the list of other larger wonders.
Ah, Touissa! The day he died, the family realized he didn’t have any identity papers on him, which meant a burial permit couldn’t be secured. Twelve witnesses were found to attest that the corpse that was to be put into the ground was in fact that of Abdelkader, the son of Haji Abdeslam bin Hammad Laâbi Rashidi and of Fatima bint Abderrahmane Shaqshaq, who it was presumed had been born in Fez in 1915.