We paid off Llrange, a decent guard, to bring us notebooks and pencils. We decided to keep a journal. Claiming he was not much of a writer, Mamed dictated his thoughts to me. It became clear that we did not have the same perception of time, or of the life we were leading within those four walls. He told me about a female ogre with plastic teeth who visited him at the same time every day, with whom he talked about his future. He made up all sorts of crazy stories. If he hadn't been sick, he might have been taken for a surrealist. But though he had a sense of form, he lacked the vocabulary.
9
After we got out of prison, neither of us was ever the same. Despite our appeals to high-ranking officials, we couldn't get our passports renewed to leave the country. We were still being punished. The royal pardon had not restored all of our personal freedoms. One morning, soon after our release, we met our old friend Ramon in the hammam. He liked the Moorish baths. We told him we needed women immediately. He took care of everything, even paying for the women. Unfortunately, it seemed our sex organs were still traumatized by our incarceration. I felt bad about it. Ramon tried to reassure me, saying this often happened to him. I knew he was lying to make me feel better. The wine was OK, the girls were nice, but we were completely out of our element.
Mamed decided to go back to medical school in Rabat, the capital. I decided to give up film studies to enroll in the Faculty of Arts, and major in history and geography. "It's the writing of the Earth," one of our professors said, explaining the word "geography." He added that the Earth also writes the story of humanity.
Student activism was widespread, but Mamed and I no longer wanted to be involved. We were considered "veteran conspirators," and the secret police watched our every move. Mamed trusted no one. That didn't stop him from spending time with a guy who was short, ugly, and dirty, but intelligent. This guy was curious about everything, and he went out of his way to help Mamed. I had a bad feeling about him. He was too friendly to be honest. I asked him about his job. He was vague and secretive. He claimed to work for an advertising company. In fact, he was really a cop. We found this out later when the Ministry of the Interior appointed him head of the censorship bureau. The whole thing made Mamed sick. He couldn't get over it. He was mad at himself for having been taken in. "To think he talked to me about Kant, Heidegger, film, and art, plus he was such an ardent critic of the government and the police!" Later, this spy made a career in intelligence. His dream was to be a writer. He wrote a few lines of poetry, published them at his own expense, and distributed them to government agencies. On a Moroccan television show, he was introduced as a promising young Francophone writer.
The undercover agent had clearly been jealous of our friendship. Mamed listened to him without taking him seriously, but continued seeing him, until the guy made the mistake of criticizing me and my family.
10
Mamed married ghita even before he finished the course-work for his medical specialization in pulmonology. His parents were upset, and they asked me to do my best to convince him to wait. They considered me Mamed's best friend, someone he held in great esteem. Not surprisingly, I had no luck with Mamed. He was stubborn, and became resentful whenever anyone tried to make him change his mind. This rigidity annoyed me. We avoided talking about it, because when we did, he lost his sense of humor and even his ability to think straight. One day, after a discussion in which he had to admit he was wrong, he became unusually angry, saying: "Sometimes I wonder why we're friends, since we never agree about anything." I didn't take this comment seriously. He wasn't making any sense. For once I was the one to bring up his faults, something he never hesitated to do with me. We never seemed able to give each other a break. But somehow things were never even.
Mamed and Ghita s wedding took place as planned. I was the couples closest friend. Ghita, a pretty brunette, was an unemployed sociologist. I knew Mamed wanted to have a family; he had sown his wild oats. But I was surprised that he decided so quickly. He told me it was not love at first sight. It had developed slowly-slowly but surely. He had a theory about married life that was a mixture of cliche and real reflection. For him, love blossomed through daily cohabitation. He cited his parents as an example. According to him, it was better to choose a virtuous woman rather than a great beauty who was arrogant and difficult. So Mamed settled down, and I was the only friend he continued to see on a regular basis. He had changed. He had gained weight, and he became irascible.
Little things made him angry. He no longer had any patience. Our time together was not as relaxed and easy as before. It seemed to bother him that I was still a bachelor.
I had no desire to settle down and marry a nice girl just to avoid being alone. When I met Soraya, it was love at first sight, an earthquake, a tempest in my heart, an avalanche of light and stars. Unlike Mamed, I chose beauty, which came with both arrogance and fickleness. Mamed refused to voice his opinion, claiming the issue was too personal to be discussed, even between close friends. Against the advice of my parents, I married Soraya. Her mere presence made me deliriously happy. She was intelligent and shrewd, volatile and vivacious. I had one year of peace and happiness with Soraya. She never argued with me, and she was good to my elderly parents. She was sweet and loving in public, and even became friends with Ghita, which pleased Mamed. He wanted to hire Soraya as an assistant in his clinic. I refused, thinking this might someday jeopardize our friendship. Mamed finally agreed with me, and instead hired a young nurse who wasn't particularly gracious but very efficient.
After finishing my degree, I was appointed professor of history and geography in Larache, a small coastal fishing town eighty kilometers south of Tangier. I commuted to work, as Soraya's parents had lent us an apartment in a building they owned. They refused to rent it, claiming that Moroccans were unreliable tenants. My wife worked as a nurse in the local Red Cross Society. We lived a petit-bourgeois existence, with limited horizons and limited ambitions. Once in a while, Ramon came to visit. He had married a Moroccan woman and converted to Islam. He now called himself Ab-derrahim, and he spoke Arabic. He said, "Ramon, Rahim- it's practically the same thing." But to us, he was still Ramon.
11
Mamed and I had a weekly rituaclass="underline" we met in a cafe every Sunday morning between eight and nine. First we discussed current events, then turned to gossip. From time to time, some of our old high school classmates or teachers would join us. We always avoided making political observations. We knew that police informants lurked among the cafegoers. Those were the days when Morocco lived under a sort of martial law, under which opponents of the government were arrested. Some disappeared forever. Faced with their families, the police would pretend to look for them, knowing, of course, that another branch of the police had taken care of them for good. We were haunted by this idea of disappearing forever, vanishing into thin air, reduced to a mound of earth without being officially declared dead. Lost and never found. Lost and never buried. I remember a woman who went crazy, wandering the streets with a photo of her son, refusing to go home until she found him. She slept on the sidewalk in front of the police headquarters. One day she vanished. People said the police had made her disappear, just like her son. We lived with this fear in our guts, but we never talked about it.