A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me Read online

  “So you don’t know? Better for you.”

  There was something resembling a smirk on his face, or a muffled laugh that knows there’s a hole in front of you, but that doesn’t want to point it out before you fall in. Then he told me: My leave had been revoked, and that we would set off, the four of us, at midnight, so as to reach the well in the morning to get water.

  “But do you know what sort of weapon the enemy uses?”

  No one responded to his question because Brahim was still busy with the turtle, or at least that’s the impression he was giving. Mohamed Ali put his head down like someone whose head had started to hurt all of a sudden and Naafi was counting his tourists. The brigadier leaned on the counter again and lifted his empty glass to his mouth, then slammed it down violently on the wooden counter. Fifi came over and put another bottle in front of him. He filled his glass until the foam spilled over the edge. He lifted it to his mouth and this time the beer spilled all over his uniform.

  “They use Kalashnikovs,” he said. “New, Russian-made Kalashnikovs. Have you guys ever seen one?”

  I hadn’t seen one, but I didn’t tell that to the brigadier. I had seen the rifle that Naafi used to hunt the gazelles that he’d give to Fifi as a gift. As for the enemy? The enemy’s weapon? No. But I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for him to finish, as were the others. Or maybe I wasn’t waiting for anything anymore after the devastating news I had just heard. As for Brigadier Omar, his unjustified victory made him laugh. It wasn’t us who caused him to fall to the ground. That’s what I was about to say, but he continued, intoxicated by what he was saying, even more so now that what he was saying was getting through to us.

  “And do you know where they are? The enemy? At the well. Guarding the well itself. Tomorrow they’ll wait for you so you can see them up close, or maybe they’ll wait for you to not see him, just like before.”

  He laughed. He drank from his glass, pushed it toward Fifi, and left before falling over for a third time.

  I wasn’t thinking about the well or about the thirty kilometers that separated us from it that we would cross at night. I wasn’t thinking about the enemy and whether or not they would appear. The time for this had not yet come. My mind was preoccupied with Zineb. We hadn’t parted under the best of circumstances. I told myself that this was because of her illness. I had thought that she was pregnant for a second time and, rather than being happy like any other woman would be, the news unraveled her nerves. It wasn’t the first time she had gotten pregnant. The first miscarriage had made her permanently apprehensive. But no, she was just tired, I told myself. What worried me more, though, was that she would be on her own, in bed. I asked her to go to her sister Leila’s in Bab Aghmat. Her sister is a housewife. She doesn’t go out at all. She’d be able to take care of her more than anyone else would, but Zineb refused, with the excuse that the never-ending noise of her three children would drive her crazy. Or she could go stay with my mother and sister Fadila in Sidi Benslimane. No, she didn’t want to put anyone out.

  In the end, she said that the doctor would visit her whenever he could. The doctor and his wife are friends whom Zineb had met back in the days of the cinema club, before she met me. Then I met them, through her. They’re true friends, as she says, despite the relationship we have with them, which has not always been great. There were some violent rumblings at one point and, another time, a complete breakdown. However, the waters of friendship flowed between us once again, and when she asked them to visit her from time to time, they said they’d come to keep her company every day after work. Zineb opposed this suggestion too. She saw it as too great a commitment on their part, but they insisted on staying late into the night with Zineb since they had no children waiting at home for them, allowing them to spend most of their time after work going from one friend’s house to another’s. They said that the only time they relaxed was when they were with Zineb, and that Zineb was the only person they knew who deserved this sacrifice of their time.

  “Isn’t that so, Zineb my dear?”

  Collective laughter. Then the doctor said, turning to her, “The soldier will be gone, but the artist will remain here.”

  I met Zineb four years ago. She was twenty-two and we were getting ready to participate in a television talent show, Zineb as a singer and me as a comedian. I wouldn’t have met Zineb were it not for the chance I was given to be in that show, and this is one of the mysteries that continues to perplex me, just like the desert I saw in the dream. I keep saying to myself that if I hadn’t been a part of that very program, I never would have met her. If I had stopped and hesitated in front of the television studio door and turned back down the stairs, if I had told the program director not to nominate me (just to see what would happen, as they said), and if she had not looked at me with that encouraging look while I was preparing to stand in front of the camera for the first time in front of a new audience filling the studio, then I would now be sitting in that remote tavern on the edge of the desert and not thinking about any girl, or thinking about another girl. She might be beautiful, but she wouldn’t be Zineb. She might even work in a nightclub like the one Zineb works in, but she wouldn’t be the woman I love, who I’m thinking of now as I sit at Fifi’s counter watching Brahim stare at the turtle walking away from him.

  Whoever was watching television that night saw a young man of twenty-three performing his sketches on a brightly lit stage. That viewer might or might not have been laughing, but he wouldn’t have known what I had been concerned with just moments before. I was standing behind the curtain, filled with self-doubt, studying the room I was about to plunge into, reviewing the sketch I was going to present, and not even thinking about whether it would please the committee. My main concern was that it would please Zineb because I had fallen in love with her the moment I saw her. My heart had never beaten the way it beat at that moment. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Prior to that moment, I had never felt attached to a girl. This inner turmoil and shock was happening to me for the first time, in a room filled to the rafters with an audience of young men and women, as well as middle-aged men and women, some wearing djellabas and others not. I turned to my left and saw her. She wasn’t thinking about what she was going to perform for the audience like I was. She was neither surprised nor scared. She was calm, just focused on the task at hand. She was a singer at the Shahrazade Cabaret and she was intent on appearing on the program in order to become a professional singer. I’m not sure how sound her thinking was. As for me, I didn’t gain fame or fortune from this television appearance, but what I did gain was Zineb, and that’s the important thing. I gained everything that night, to the point where, a few months later, I realized the most beautiful thing that could happen to me was that I marry Zineb.

  The night of the show I was really rattled and couldn’t say whether her singing had moved me or not. I wouldn’t know that until a few days later at the Shahrazade. Of all the things that happened that night at the studio, I only remember one thing: her encouraging, optimistic smile and the colored lights reflecting off her face like little lanterns. She dragged a stool over to me and sat on it, and I sat as well. When I gazed at her face, my whole being was filled with tranquility, as if a hidden bond had been formed at that very instant. I left the television studio singing. Life seemed full of promise and, without knowing why, I lifted my eyes to the sky. It was blue and clear, magnificent. It seemed to me that those passing in the street knew my secret, and they were happy, satisfied in knowing it.

  I remember the first time I kissed her, months later. When her moist lips touched mine and quenched the thirst of those arid years, a fever came over my entire body. A heat spread over the skin of my face. I felt a light trembling. It was pitiful, ridiculous. Luckily we were in a dimly lit place. I remember her in the days that followed—normal days for the most part—sitting in front of me, leaning her head on her hand, putting her little finger between her lips and staying like that, studying me for a long time,
while I was drowning in a sweet happiness that didn’t give me the time to wonder: “What is Zineb thinking about right now?” We were sharing the same shyness, the same awkwardness, the same desire. Or perhaps in these special moments, we didn’t have a defined idea about “us”; we were without concerns, and perhaps even without any desire except for that which had to do with our being together in the same place, sharing those moments. After these four years, despite the storms we have weathered together, there’s no doubt that her tender body remembers the scent of blossoms that floated around us the day we kissed for the first time.

  4

  AZIZA, MY THIRD WIFE, IS a young woman who isn’t more than twenty-four years of age. She’s been good to me, so far. I know her mother controls her and that she goads her to try and fleece me every chance she gets. Until now, Aziza has remained reasonable. She hasn’t yet been bold enough to actually do this, but how long will she resist? I can’t picture things going on like this forever. Sooner or later, she’ll show her teeth. Anything else would be strange and unusual, and I wouldn’t expect it. I’m sixty years old and Aziza is twenty-four. When I first met her mother, she didn’t ask me the usual questions: How did you meet my daughter? Where? What are your intentions? No. She went right into talking about herself, her humble family, my status at the palace, and her husband the butcher who left home and abandoned them—her along with two sons and four daughters—with no support. All of this before he remarried and rented a house not far away, his life continuing normally as if he had never met any of them. What was she expecting from me? To become a husband to her daughter and to provide for her and her kids? She didn’t ask about Aziza and our future together. Instead, she kept on talking to me about her pitiful life, as well as that of her husband the butcher who had forgotten all about them. “He opens his shop every morning, you know, and he closes it every evening, like someone without a care in the world, and he doesn’t provide them with a single morsel of meat, despite how hungry they are.”

  When she heard what her mother said, Aziza provided commentary. Laughing, she said to me, “Now that you have entered our lives, you won’t get out unscathed.” What could she have possibly meant by this nonsense?

  I always wonder what her mother has in store for me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Aziza loves me, despite all the appreciation she has shown me up until now. I’m not so foolish as to be convinced that she accepted marriage to a man approaching sixty because of my good looks and charm, or because of my status and position, or even because of the respect she saw in peoples’ behavior toward me. Oh no. It is because she’s poor and she saw that marrying me was an opportunity for her little fingers to grab onto some prestige and for her to know what fortune feels like. I see this especially in the eyes of her mother who has come to view my inevitable death as some sort of deliverance. I picture her praying morning and night that what she wants might finally come to pass.

  For the past couple of days, I have thought of telling her that I have children with another woman, just to skew her calculations and keep her forever in my control. It is the first time I’ve thought of them in a long time. However, I’m afraid of making Aziza angry. Her mother thinks I’m sitting on top of the treasures of Solomon, that I’m stingy, and that I would be of more use to them dead. I’m not sure where she gets these ideas and I always wonder why she behaves this way toward me. We’ve never delved into the matter directly, but we think about it. Each one of us sees it in the eyes of the other. I meet my obligations toward her daughter, and provide her with some largesse as well by buying her a sheep every year for the Eid feast. Despite that, she never lets an opportunity pass to spread gossip all over the neighborhood and beyond about my unfair treatment toward her and her family. Women are strange beings, and the reason for her hatred toward me will remain forever unknown, just as this marriage will remain one of Aziza’s secrets, or one of their secrets. Aziza hesitated for a long time before agreeing to marry me, but in the end she agreed, and that’s all that matters.

  This wicked mother of hers once told me Aziza had a relationship with a young man she was going to marry. I think she invents these stories whenever she decides to visit us, just to darken what’s left of the day. She said that Aziza might still love that young man, or that she may have just left him temporarily because he didn’t quite understand her, yet there remained something inside her that longed for him. She said that her daughter was desperate.

  “Why is she desperate? What is she missing?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly what I don’t understand,” she said, and added that she was doing everything in her power for me to take that young man’s place in Aziza’s heart. She’d make Aziza love me more than she had loved that young man whose name she didn’t want to say out loud, out of respect and appreciation for me. This woman is no idiot. She didn’t forget to add in the end that she’d keep to her promise as long as I paid her the necessary attention. That was how she began taking advantage of me. From then on, she did with me as she pleased. She would take my wallet whenever she wanted and buy things she didn’t need, with me paying for them willingly, throwing money out the window, as they say. And me, what could I do other than wait for God to deal kindly with her and with us?

  Good days nonetheless. I like it when Aziza sits facing me, when she moves in front me shaking her buttocks, proudly showing off her lithe body. When she irons my clothes, I love her because she’s Aziza, because she’s twenty-four years old, because I become ravenous whenever I see her and whenever I think of her, because I can’t picture life without her; without women in general, for that matter. I have crossed enough barren deserts to make me weigh every word I say carefully. I’m not speaking of love. I’ll leave matters of love to adolescents and sentimentalists. What is the meaning of this love that I hear about everywhere? This thing that we can neither touch nor see? If you open up a human being’s heart and dissect it, you won’t find a single atom of the love people talk about everywhere and in every book; you’ll just find blood and sinews and veins. You won’t find a word written about it there or in the mind or liver or in any of its cells. Can you love a woman who doesn’t sleep in your bed, whose neck you can’t caress, whose breasts you can’t kiss? Can you love a woman whose fruits you cannot savor anytime you want? The love I know, and with which I love Aziza, is her lying on the bed waiting for me to come to her, or sitting next to me waiting for me to take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. Women are bodies created for us, the tribe of men, to rub against as we like, to eat and to drink and to till as we like. Man has always been this way, no matter where, and whoever says otherwise is sick or deranged.

  Thursday is a long day, the longest day of the week. From the morning, my mind is preoccupied with thoughts of her body. It gets into my blood and my whole being thumps to the rhythm that anticipates the evening when I’ll sleep with Aziza. I picture Aziza all day as she sits preparing to go to the hammam accompanied by her mother, as she walks around the house, as she lies down in the steam room. Aziza moves in my imagination like a happy dream from Thursday morning until evening. She warbles in my head endlessly like a goldfinch. I don’t do any work. I want to think of nothing but her. I listen to Abdel-Wahhab sing his old songs, which fill me with longing, and I wait for eight o’clock to arrive, at which time I will sleep with Aziza. Nothing in the world compares to these moments, when she’s in the hammam, in the steam room getting ready. She has brought her mother with her to rub down her body and prepare it for tonight while she spits venomous and deadly thoughts into Aziza’s head. She has brought enough perfume and venom with her to fill an entire night. But the night is still there waiting at the other end of the day. I can’t stand her mother, can’t bear even looking at her, but she rubs her daughter’s body, despite her venom, despite the black clouds she places between us. Everything is good, bearable, as long as this evil creature remains far away in her son’s house on the other side of the city.

  In order to make the day pass quickl
y I go to the café and play cards with Si Abbas and the café’s owner. Because I’m completely preoccupied, I lose. My thoughts are scattered, which makes me joyful and lightheaded, so I laugh. My two friends note that I am particularly happy today. Of course. It’s Thursday, and already four o’clock in the afternoon. I turn my head to look at the clock on the café wall, blackened by cigarettes and kif smoke. I see that it’s only three o’clock, not yet four. In good spirits, I continue to lose, waiting for evening to arrive.

  What more could a man of sixty want? What more could he hope for other than that his final days be calm, that pleasant moments such as these last for as long as possible, and that his life ends normally—as any man would hope for—without back or joint pain, or at least with no major problems. I try to give them the impression that my fortune does not actually comprise a fortune, as Aziza and her mother think, so as to grasp a moment of calm. Despite that, I’m not saying that I expect things to end badly. Not at all. After all of the Thursdays that have passed, all I hope for is to spend what remains of my life as I am now, in Aziza’s arms, no more, no less.

  When I go, I won’t leave them a thing to remember me by save for the few jokes that made the king laugh and that the government repeated during a discussion of the state budget. I won’t leave them a fortune that Aziza’s mother could boast of, telling the neighbors that she had hastened sending me to hell in order to enjoy the money before it was too late. I would prefer feeding it to rats. Sometimes I sit looking at them and say to myself, “If only you knew that you won’t inherit a thing, that neither you nor your wicked mother will get anything.” In any case, whatever they have in mind, they envision a fortune I do not possess. I have this high status, some money in the bank, this house that I’ll sell soon, a villa still under construction that they don’t know about, and these gifts I have received from the palace, or from this or that important person: wall clocks, valuable rugs, and trays made of silver or fine porcelain. If it were enough for her mother to simply steal some of these gifts, I wouldn’t have any problem. However, what her mother wants is to get her hands on everything that I own. The jingling of dirhams in her hands makes her delirious. I have never seen a woman who so loses her bearings and her ability to focus on anything by the mere sound of coins clinking together. The sound of money makes her happy in a way that defies the imagination. When she hears stories of the wealthy and the talents they possess for spending, it throws her off balance and her thoughts are derailed. Her deficient thought processes simply cannot absorb the fact that people spend their money as if they had found it in an alley. As for Aziza, until now she hasn’t displayed the same endless yearning or overtly hateful propensity for thievery as her mother.