Nagib snapped his fingers, as if he had resolved a particularly difficult enigma.
“I understand now why lions have such a limited vocabulary: they can roar essentially nothing. That said, I don’t really know when a lion would have the opportunity to use tra-la-la, pee-pee, or hip-hop in a conversation. At night, in the savannah.”
Hamid put an end to these flights of fancy by loudly striking the table.
“Shut up, all of you! This is my story, let me tell it or I’ll keep quiet and never open my mouth again!”
“Oh my…Look how mad he’s getting…Go on, tell us, tell us.”
Hamid started up his story again:
“If the leaders of the establishment took their heads in their hands as one man, if they roared WHAT? as one wild beast, it was because they had immediately seen the problem, ze big problem, which was…”
He interrupted himself to bend down and pet the cat, leaving us to simmer in our curiosity. Then he straightened up and began again, his voice cavernous, his eyes tragic, index finger raised as if he were at last revealing the third secret of Fatima:
“…which was the regrettable, deplorable, but nevertheless irrefutable, absence of even the smallest swimming pool in El Jadida!”
Boom! So that was it. We got down to brass tacks concerning the tragedy, the complications, the eleventh dimension. He leaned toward us all, which was a bit of a feat since there were five of us (excluding him), necessitating that he contort himself into the barycenter of a hexagon:
“Nothing! Zilch! No pool! Nada (you can say that again)!”
Nagib furrowed his brow:
“But wait a minute…I vaguely remember those days, I was a kid then, but…Wasn’t there a pool at the campsite run by Madame Muñoz’s husband? I mean her second husband, the Moroccan, what was his name?”
Time stood still as all six of us tried to remember what the devil the name of Madame Muñoz’s (Moroccan) husband was.
“Tarik? Abdelmoula? El Haj? Abdallah? Maati? Miloud? Robio? Driss? Lgouchi? Bouazza? Mohamed? El Ghoul Jr.? Hassan?”
A quarter of an hour went by before we all agreed that we had never known the name of Madame Muñoz’s (Moroccan) husband. We saw him sometimes in her villa; he would water the garden, play with the dog, smoke a cigarette, go in, go out…He was an anonymous type, it seemed, or if he had a name, he never revealed it to us, for his entire essence came down to the fact that he was the (Moroccan) husband of Madame Muñoz, and that sufficed for a name, like all men who merge with an exploit — the man who saw a bear, the man who beat El Gourch in a bicycle race, etc. For Madame Muñoz was beautiful and rich, like all French women, and so tell me how a little guy from El Jadida had managed to replace — in her heart and in her bed — her first husband, who was French and thus handsome and rich? It was an exploit at least as worthy of being recognized as that of the man who beat El Gourch (in a bicycle race).
“Anonymous or not,” resumed Nagib, “that guy managed the campsite, didn’t he? And there was a pool in the campsite, wasn’t there?”
“Yes and no,” responded Ali.
“What do you mean, yes and no? What kind of logic is that?”
“There was a pool, in the guides and on the sign at the city entrance; there was one in rumor, in hearsay, and in memory. But there wasn’t one on the site, where it should have been: it had been filled in by the previous managers, the Révolles, who had had a lot of children and who worried that one of them would fall in.”
“But it was still, nevertheless, indicated on the sign?”
“The tourists, once they were stationed on the campsite, once they had slipped into their swimsuits and let out a cry of joy (in anticipation), searching in vain for a pool in which to cool down, were angry and disappointed, but never mind, Madame Muñoz’s (Moroccan) husband showed them the way to the beach, immense and empty, and they went en masse to drown themselves in the Atlantic.”
Hamid, glacial, murmured:
“Are we done now? Can we forget about the untitled husband of mother Muñoz? Can we forget about the Révolles and their non-regulatory campsite? Can I continue?”
“Yeah, yeah, no, no, go on.”
“So: the absence of even the least swimming pool in El Jadida. Whence the problem (at the time, we used the word ‘problem’ and not ‘concern’ as we do now), whence the problem: how were they to obey the memorandum from Rabat? Then Hammou, the director of the Abou-Chouaïb-Doukkali High School, had a genius idea. After despairing for an entire day, like all of his colleagues, after envisaging resignation, failure to comply, alcohol, he took the letter from Rabat back to his office, bringing the memorandum up close to his eye — the good one — scrutinizing it closely, and then (I imagine) a smile lit up his pirate face, his eye twinkled and he said: hehe!”
“An eloquent man.”
“Hehe, he repeated, unable to shout ‘eureka!’ Hehe, he repeated; for he had noticed a detail that changed everything: the memorandum from the minister mentioned swimming, but did not specify swimming in water.”
Intense excitement at Café de l’Univers. We looked at each other, taken aback. After a few moments of floundering, so to speak, Ali summed up our stupefaction:
“Swimming in water…You know of other kinds?”
Hamid very slowly nodded his head, his eyes expressionless, his breath barely perceptible, like a tortoise that knows something you don’t. He cleared his throat and demanded, Socratically:
“What is swimming, deep down?”
“Exactly, it mustn’t take place deep down,” replied Nagib. “One must remain on the surface.”
“You big idiot! When I ask ‘What is swimming?’ I’m being rhetorical. I’m not waiting for someone to answer me, I’ll answer myself. And my answer is this: swimming is, above all, movements. Movements! Yes, messieurs! That’s why we say swimming strokes.”
Hamid lifted himself halfway up on his seat and seemed to convulse. Worried, we looked for the Moor, so that he might quickly fetch a doctor, or, if unable to find one, the corner healer, with his herbs and dried lizards. Then we understood that Hamid was in fact in the middle of essplanining something, like the philosopher who proves his theories by acting them out, Hamid was demonstrating swimming by swimming in the (“golden brown”) air of Casablanca.
“The art of the swimmer,” he said, gesticulating furiously, “lies in stringing together the appropriate movements. The chest, the legs, the arms — all move in a coordinated fashion. Harmoniously. It’s the crux of the affair: there are only gestures. Propulsion? Well, propulsion is nothing, my friends. It follows naturally.”
We considered this proposition for a moment. Ali triggered the counterattack.
“Wait…If propulsion follows naturally, if, in other words, it is only secondary to the swimmer’s art, why is it that competitions are decided in the order in which the athletes arrive at their destination? The fastest wins; thus, propulsion is the most important thing.”
“False. It is scientifically proven that it’s the quality of the movements that assures propulsion: thus it merely follows naturally. Look at the bumpkins bobbing on Sundays at Sidi Bouzid. Most of them ‘doggy paddle,’ which consists by and large of doing a lot of uncoordinated movements, as long as they manage to keep their heads above the water. These bumpkins don’t move more than a centimeter. You can continue your conversation with them, you on the beach, them in the water; after a quarter of an hour, they’re still there, wriggling and telling you about the moussem of Moulay Abdallah. While the rare person who manages to imitate the crawl, or the breaststroke, well, they manage in the end to travel a bit. I repeat: swimming is, above all, movements.”
We were not convinced.
“Alright, we’re convinced. So?”