The Blue Hour (23 page)

“It's you who should be telling this story,” he said. “Yes, Paul believed Faiza when she told him she was on the pill. So when she announced, ‘
Mon chéri, j'ai une grande nouvelle à t'annoncer. Je suis enceinte'—
well, Paul was stunned by the news. When he didn't exactly sweep up Faiza in his arms and proclaim that she was the love of his life and that,
bien sûr,
a child together would be the ultimate expression of their
amour éternel,
she began to hector him, insisting that they get married. When he hesitated, she told her family. Her father showed up with her two rather violent brothers at the École des Beaux-Arts just a kilometer or so from here, threatening to castrate Paul if he didn't marry Faiza on the spot. They also raised so much stink with the head of the college that Paul was suspended, but told by our enlightened principal that he could have his job back if he married Faiza and made her an honest woman. For around twenty-four hours the two brothers actually had Paul trapped in his flat. Then their father showed up with Faiza, an imam, and a lawyer. They insisted on being let in, Faiza crying wildly, telling Paul that she was going to die if he didn't marry her. Paul panicked. Paul let them in. He went through with the shotgun service there and then. Said the vows, signed the legal document, tried to kiss the bride, who then began to insult him and stormed off with her father, saying she'd see him tomorrow when her brothers returned to move him into their new home in Rabat. ‘I have found you a job teaching English there,' his new father-in-law announced to him. The two brothers informed Paul that they would be downstairs, guarding the front and back doors—so there was no way he was going to be able to do a run for the airport. As soon as they were gone, Paul phoned me in a total panic. I told him he'd been insane to have gone through with the marriage, but that I would find him a way out of this nightmare. Which is what I did. Around three hours later I called Paul back and told him to get his passport and a small bag and head to the roof of the building at precisely midnight. I put on a djellaba with a hood. I didn't know if Faiza had alerted her brothers about Paul's fat gay artist friend who might try to rescue him, but I was taking no chances. Dressed in my djellaba—my face hidden within its hood—I drove down to his
quartier
. He lived in an area where the buildings were so packed together that it was a three-foot jump from one roof to the next. But you had to do the jump right, as it was a ten-story fall if you made a misstep. I had to bribe the superintendent of the adjoining building to give me access to the roof. It cost seven hundred dirhams—a small fortune back then, but I had just sold a painting and also I knew that if I didn't get Paul out of the country he would be throwing his future away on a woman who, for all her bohemian, ‘second sex' cant, was a future harridan in waiting.

“Now, Faiza's brothers were not stupid. I discovered that they had hired some stooge to guard the rear of the apartment building where Paul lived. That rear entrance was located next to the building onto which he was going to jump. Anyway, I left the area, returning around a quarter hour before midnight. One of Faiza's brothers was positioned outside Paul's building. When I entered the adjoining building—still wearing the djellaba with its hood tied close across my face—the superintendent told me that their stooge was still out guarding the back door. Up I went to the roof. Even thirty years ago, walking up ten flights was torture for me. Still, there was Paul—on the other roof, looking down with fear at the gap between the two buildings, terrified of making the jump, rooted to the spot. I had to signal him with a cigarette lighter. When he wouldn't move, I remember hissing at him, ‘If you don't jump you are sentencing yourself to a lifetime of marital servitude with a woman who will grind your talent, your gift, into the ground. Stand still and die. Or jump and live.'

“Of course he jumped—and managed to twist his ankle on landing, which made things just a little complicated when it came to getting him down ten floors. But we eventually made it. The superintendent brought us down a series of corridors to the rear exit. Before Paul set foot outside he changed into the hooded djellaba I'd brought for him. He hobbled out the back door, leaning on my shoulder for support, walking right past the stooge who'd been posted by the brothers to look out for their sister's fleeing American lover. When the guy saw Paul limping, he actually took his other arm and helped him to where I'd parked the beat-up Peugeot I drove back then. To his credit, despite being in terrible pain, Paul kept his mouth shut. And he'd tied the djellaba so tightly across his face that his very Caucasian identity remained hidden from view. The stooge had Paul by the other arm, asking me why he was limping. I informed him that he was deaf and dumb and had been set upon by bandits. Fortunately for us the man was so stupid, and also had a certain shred of kindness in him for an apparently disabled cripple, that he never once questioned the absurdity of the story I was spinning. He even wished us both luck as we drove off.

“I knew that Faiza's father—having certain connections, owing to his position at the Moroccan Central Bank—was probably having the airport watched, or at least had made certain that Paul wouldn't be able to board a flight back to the States. Which is why I drove him the six hours—no
autoroutes
in those days—up to Tangier, and got him on the six a.m. ferry to Malaga. I even gave him enough pesetas to get himself a doctor for his ankle, a hotel room for the night, and a train ticket up to Madrid. And then”—Ben Hassan snapped his fingers—“whoosh! Paul Leuen vanished from my life.”

“Surely he contacted you when he got back to the States?” I asked.

Ben Hassan shook his head.

“Did he ever repay you?”

Again he shook his head.

“What happened when the baby was born?”

“What happened? Faiza endured the shame of being a single mother. She wasn't allowed to work at the
lycée
for several years, and struggled to make ends meet through tutoring and even cleaning other people's apartments, as her family largely disowned her.”

“Surely she tried to contact Paul.”

“She tried. She failed. She went to the US Embassy with her father, demanding some sort of action, actually seeing if they could get him extradited back to Morocco and force him to play house with her. The US counsel said that, outside of finding an American lawyer who could try to chase Paul for child support, there was nothing they could do to get him back here. Though Faiza wrote him several times, showing him pictures of their baby daughter, he maintained his veil of silence. Even when I wrote him after—”

He broke off, reaching for his glass of wine, drained it in one go, poured himself another substantial slug, and polished off most of it immediately.

“After what?” I asked.

Ben Hassan hesitated before speaking.

“Faiza's father was furious to discover that Paul had managed to slip out of the building undetected. He vented his rage at his sons who, in turn, beat up the sad little stooge who'd been guarding the back door. Beat him up so badly that he was hospitalized for months. Then, on their father's orders, they strong-armed the superintendent of the building next door and found out who had whisked their now vanished brother-in-law away. The superintendent gave them my name. The two brothers cornered me leaving the École that evening. They dragged me into an alley. And used a hammer to smash all my fingers.”

“You're serious?” I asked, my voice a stunned whisper. “They did that?”

He held out his hands.

“Every finger. Smashed to a pulp. All bones broken. The pain was so overwhelming I passed out. I was found hours later by a street cleaner. Thank God he ran into the École and found two of my colleagues still on duty, teaching night classes. They called the police and the
pompiers
, and both came with me to the hospital. Thank God as well they were there, as the doctor on duty was so appalled by the catastrophic state of my fingers that he wanted to have them amputated. My colleagues—both artists—insisted that he do nothing so rash. But the fingers were so pulverized that I was in a pair of casts for over a year. I got lucky. There was a French orthopedic surgeon who had decided on a change of scene and was on a three-year secondment to the big hospital here in Casablanca. He took an interest in my case—and convinced me to undergo a series of experimental bone reconstruction operations. Ten in total, followed by around three years of physiotherapy. It took those pathetic little men just two or three minutes to destroy my hands, and for me, over thirty-six months of agonizing surgery and reconstruction to be able to hold a pen again.”

I truly didn't know what to say. Except: “Was Paul aware of the price you paid for helping him escape?”

“I wrote him . . . correction: I dictated a letter to him, as it was around two months after the attack. I explained what had befallen me in the wake of driving him to Tangier. I didn't ask for any money or recompense. I just wanted him to know what had gone down, what those bastards did to me.”

“What was Paul's reply?”

As Ben Hassan reached for his wine, I noticed for the first time just how much work it took him to grasp the stem of his glass, and how his large fingers were more misshapen than corpulent.

Ben Hassan took another long sip of wine, and I could see that he was steadying himself, tamping down some of the anger within.

“Paul's reply was . . . silence. Even when I wrote him back another eight weeks after my first letter . . . nothing but silence.”

“I'm truly shocked that the brothers and father were never prosecuted for what they had perpetrated.”

“The police arrested the three of them. But Papa had connections. And the two boys said in court—yes, there was a hearing in front of a judge—that they had attacked me after I attempted to come on to one of them. This being the nineteen eighties they accepted gay-bashing as a defense. They reached an out-of-court settlement with me for one hundred thousand dirhams.”

“But that's just twelve thousand dollars.”

“Back then it was enough to buy an apartment . . . which is what I did with the money. The apartment in which you will be staying tonight.”

“What happened to your hands?”

“The French surgeon was a miracle worker. He reconstructed the bones, and he reconnected certain nerve endings so I could have some feeling in them. But not an exceptional amount of feeling. Even today . . .”

He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a disposable lighter, ignited the flame, and held it directly under his left pinky—and didn't flinch once as the flame came into direct contact with his flesh.

“As you can see,” he said, “there is considerable permanent numbness. And my ability to hold a paintbrush, even after the ten operations and all that physiotherapy . . . well, to be blunt about it, my career as a painter was decimated after what Faiza's brothers did. Those paintings you see in my apartment . . .
à la recherche du temps perdu
. Ancient history.”

“I don't know what to say . . . what a terrible story.”

“That it is. Still, in Chinese calligraphy, the symbol for ‘crisis' has two meanings: danger and opportunity. My opportunity in the wake of the attack on my hands was to become . . . how shall I put this? . . . a facilitator. Someone who could pull strings, grease palms, work wonders with travel documents, settle scores.”

I had a question I didn't dare pose. Ben Hassan did it for me.

“I sense you want to know what happened to Faiza's father and brothers, after they bought me my apartment. Faiza, wanting to repay me in kindness for the cruelty her family had inflicted upon me, regularly visited me in the hospital and insisted on hiring people to do the initial decorative work on the new apartment. I can't say that we were ever friends. She's quite the bitter, disappointed woman. She never truly got over losing Paul, especially as the next man in her life was a stockbroker who was, in my opinion, Prince Not So Bright, though I gather he could play a decent round of golf. By the time Samira was an adolescent, their mother-daughter relationship was like something out of a bad Joan Crawford film. Then the stockbroker lost everything, including their home. Samira lived in my guest room for several months, then went to France for a spell, but didn't have a
carte de séjour
so she couldn't find work. Even though she could have gotten an American passport through her father, the fact that he never claimed paternity and refused all letters from Samira to meet her, or at least tell the US authorities that, yes, she was his daughter . . . that made it administratively difficult for her. And her bitterness just grew.

“Faiza, meanwhile, managed to alienate the director of the
lycée
where she taught. But then, at a cocktail thing here in town, she met a man named Hamsad who was the director of the film studios in Ouarzazate. Within months she was living down there on the edge of the Sahara—a place which, though somewhat picturesque, has always struck me as a recipe for despair after seventy-two hours. Still, with her daughter estranged from her, with another relatively well-heeled man willing to look out for her, and even a job opening at a language school there . . . off she went to the desert. That was five years ago. The relationship fell apart after around eighteen months. Hamsad showed her the door. I gather that she's still teaching at the language institute, and she was rather supportive of Samira when she fell pregnant and her foreign lover returned to France.”

“So history repeats itself.”

“Only, in this instance, the gentleman—his name is Philippe—acted reasonably. He's paying close to the equivalent of five hundred euros a month in child support, and also offering to part-finance an apartment for Samira and her child.”