The Last Friend (2 page)

Khadija fled, followed by two of the other girls. We joined them, leaving Mamed to enumerate his girlfriend's "flaws" by himself. We were appalled, and vowed never to have another gathering on the Old Mountain again with that monster.

That night, Mamed rang my doorbell. He was in tears. He'd been smoking marijuana, he said, and drinking strong Spanish beer. Would I ever be able to forgive him?

I suddenly saw in him an unhappy young man, profoundly ill at ease, who disliked himself and everyone else, too. He needed psychiatric help. He wanted to try some kind of therapy, but he didn't want people to think he was crazy. He avoided Khadija completely, and generally kept to himself. I was the only person he would see. He trusted me, and made every effort to temper his mean streak. He retained his sense of irony, but used it more wisely. When I ran into logistical problems with my girlfriend-there was nowhere for us to be alone-Mamed told me about the secret affair he was having with a young woman who worked for his parents. He was "beating his straw" less and less, but was afraid his mother might send the girl away. "She's working-class," he told me. "A virgin, of course. We don't speak. I see her at night, and she waits for me naked, ass up. I lie on top of her, spread her ass, and penetrate her, with my hand over her mouth so she can't make any noise. I never ejaculate inside her. I come. She comes. Everyone's happy. In the morning, when she sees me, she looks away, and so do I."

During our senior year, when we were preparing for the baccalaureate, Married was more subdued. A small group of us studied together at the Cafe Hafa, and he would join us. He was good at math, which was useful for the rest of us. He sometimes made jokes, but was careful not to go too far. I managed to get him back together with Khadija, with whom he was now in love although he wouldn't admit it. Mamed found me a place where I could finally make love with Zina. "The frantic sessions in the cemetery are over," he said. "From now on, you can use Francois' apartment." Our gym teacher had gone home to Brittany on vacation, leaving the keys with Mamed, who would water the plants and feed the cats in return.

I was ecstatic. Mamed and I worked out a schedule: he used the apartment one day, I used it the next. A red thumbtack on the door meant "do not disturb." When we left, we replaced it with a green one. The summer was great. We met in the evenings to exchange confidences. The apartment was our secret. None of our other friends knew about it. Neither one of us said a word to anyone. At stake were the lives of girls who were supposed to save their virginity for marriage no matter what. We saw the girls in the afternoon, never at night. With Zina, I used what we called at that time "the stroke of the paintbrush." I rubbed my cock against her vagina without penetrating her. I had to be extremely careful. Mamed told me he preferred sodomy.

The summer of 1962 marked our relationship in a way we would never forget. Friendship begins with sharing secrets. Mamed's sister became friends with Khadija and Zina. With her as our chaperone, it was easier for us to go out. Our parents no longer had to worry about us. Mamed and I developed a code to communicate without arousing suspicion. He would say, "Tomorrow I have to water Monsieur Francois's plants. The next day, it's your turn to feed the cats. Don't forget to stop at the fish market for some sardines. These cats are really spoiled."

Although we weren't getting much sexual experience, we were having a good time. One day, Mamed told me he was tired of fucking Khadija in the ass. He wanted to penetrate a vagina, a real one, without guilt or fear. For that, we would need prostitutes. The best place, he informed me, was Ceuta, a Spanish enclave east of Tangier. Spanish prostitutes were known to be clean and expert. Our friend Ramon would guide us. He knew where to go. All we had to do was find the money. Mamed would tell his parents he was going to buy records, since there was not much music in the market in Tangier. His father was a music lover. Mamed would get the money by promising his father the latest recording of Mozart's
Don Giovanni.
Somehow I had to find a way to get some money from my parents.

Ramon was not one of our friends from school. He had a job, working in his father s plumbing business. We practiced our Spanish with him, but mostly we went to parties together. Ramon was very popular with the girls. He made us laugh because whenever something excited him-especially the sight of a beautiful girl-he stuttered.

So there we were, on the bus heading for Tetouan, then Ceuta. We arrived in the evening. Ramon had the address of a boarding house where we could sleep, and another where we could fuck.

I drank wine for the first time, and thought it was disgusting. At the Fuentes Pension, the girls were sitting downstairs, their bodies on display. You had to pay in advance, fifty pesetas a shot. Mamed chose a blonde with big breasts. In fact, she was a Moroccan with dyed hair. Ramon was a regular. He had his usual girl, a redhead with short hair and flashing eyes.

I went upstairs with a slender brunette with a sad look. I thought she was going to be an expert. She was tired and blase. I came quickly. She heaved a sigh of relief. She washed herself in front of me, and then, when she rinsed her mouth, she took out her dentures. I went downstairs, repelled by the whole thing, and waited for the others outside. Mamed had found a good one; half an hour of fucking, as opposed to my miserable five minutes. His was named Katy. Mine was Mercedes, and I was her fourteenth client of the day. She told me her limit was fifteen. It was a matter of principle. But, she told me, I only counted for half. "You're too young for this!"

Half a client! I was upset, but didn't want to tell Mamed, who looked very pleased with himself. He told me he was satisfied, he felt good, and Katy had promised to see him in Tangier. She had a place there where they could have sex. If I liked, she would bring Mercedes. We could all go to Ramon's house. Ramon nodded in agreement.

No way! I didn't want to hear any more about Ceuta and its whores. I have never forgotten old Mercedes and her false teeth. Burlesque images replayed themselves in my mind. All I could think about was the story of the vagina with sharp teeth. Mamed could tell I was unhappy. He thought it had to do with morality, guilt, or sin. No, I was troubled because I had seen something I should not have had to see, a moment of incredible pathos: a toothless woman wiping her thighs with an old wet rag while I pulled on my pants. Mamed tried to console me. He came home with me, and we spent the evening listening to the radio. I felt like crying. Early the next morning, we went to the hammam in the Rue Ouad Ahardane.

Mamed NO longer hid when he had a cigarette, but he never dared smoke in front of his parents. It was a matter of respect. His father was a courteous, reserved man. When I greeted him, I kissed his hand, as I did with my own father. He did not know that everyone called his son Mamed, a diminutive of Mohammed.

One day, a school friend phoned Mamed's house, and his father answered. He did not appreciate his son's nickname, and gave him a lecture. "It was an honor for me to give you the name of our beloved prophet. I slaughtered the sheep with my own hands at your baptism, and here you are allowing yourself to be given this ridiculous name. Your name is Mohammed, and I don't want to hear 'Mamed' ever again."

Mamed told us about this, adding that he was a bad Muslim, and found it difficult to bear the name of the prophet.

Anyway, practically everyone in Morocco was named Mohammed.

During the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast between dawn and dusk, we went to see our friend Francois. He had prepared mushroom omelettes for us. Mamed insisted on having a slice of ham and a glass of wine, too. Not only was he not fasting, he was flouting Muslim dietary laws. The omelette was enough for me; I begged Allah to forgive my momentary lapse. At sunset, we gathered around our family dinner tables, pretending to be weak from hunger and thirst like the others.

The evenings of Ramadan had something magical about them. The cafes were full. The men played a Spanish dice game. The women paraded their children through the streets. The city was lively. Mamed smoked cigarette after cigarette, a brand called Favorites, the cheapest, and certainly the worst for your lungs. On my first trip to France, I brought him a carton of Gitanes. He gave them back, saying he hated good tobacco. He preferred to stick to his Favorites. A few days later, he asked me to give him the Gitanes back, explaining that he hadn't wanted to get used to them, since he couldn't really afford such a luxury.

Mamed and I were given more or less the same amount of pocket money. Our parents were not rich. Mamed was always calculating his expenses. With his taste for cigarettes, wine, and magazines like
Hot Jazz,
he was always overspending. I loved movies, and found a vendor in the medina who stocked unsold copies of film magazines and newspapers. Everyone called him "Monstruo," because of his physical handicaps. He was twisted in every way possible, but he ran his small shop expertly. No one dared to make fun of him, apart from his nickname, which he had learned to accept. "So what if I'm all twisted, I can still screw your sisters!" he would say. He bought unsold copies by the kilo and let us rifle through the piles. There were all sorts of French magazines, from the highbrow
Cahiers du cinema
and
Les Temps modernes
to the lowbrow
Saint les copains.

The two of us swapped books and magazines. Mamed made fun of me because I liked
Cahiers du cinema,
which he considered elitist. He preferred the
Cine Revue,
and a magazine that had stories with pictures of naked women. We had intense debates; our other friends felt excluded. They saw us as intellectuals, interested mainly in France. They were right. When we weren't talking about sex, we were discussing culture and politics. Despite our differences, we felt close and complicitous. Neither of us ever made an important decision without asking the other. But oddly enough, we never talked about our friendship. We shared most of our lives with each other, and we were happy. It was our classmates' jealousy that made us realize how serious our friendship was.

From time to time, Ramon would join us, commenting with amusement on our closeness. He said it was unusual, that we were closer than brothers, and he wished he could be a part of it, but the fact that he was a manual laborer made this difficult. He was wrong. It certainly did not stop us from seeing him when we wanted to pick up girls.

After the baccalaureate, our paths were destined to diverge. With his scientific bent, Mamed wanted to study medicine. He dreamed about it. It was his calling. He got a scholarship and left for Nancy, in the east of France. I went to Canada for film studies. For the first few months, we wrote to each other a lot, then less frequently, but we spent that summer together on the beach in Tangier, just like in the good old days. We fell right back into our same routine: flirting with women on the beach, listening to music in the evening, and talking endlessly about the state of the world. We even covered the walls of the American School of Tangier with graffiti, with slogans like down with American imperialism, go home, and VIETNAM WILL CONQUER.

That was when Mamed told me he had joined the French Communist Party. First he harangued me with hackneyed Communist rhetoric (he seemed to have lost his sense of humor again), then read Lenin to me, whom he called "the genius." He smoked just as much as before, and said how happy he was to get back to his old, unexportable Favorites. His political activism monopolized most of his time. I was bothered by the fact that he was not at all interested in my film studies. The one time he mentioned it, he launched into a diatribe: American films helped destroy the culture of the Third World, John Ford was a racist, Howard Hawks was a manipulator, and Raoul Walsh was a one-eyed visionary.

I discovered that ideological indoctrination can blind even an intelligent mind. Our discussions no longer had the same intimacy as before. The only time it came back was when Mamed talked about the girls in Nancy. He told me he was through with sodomy. The girls there were willing to have sex, real sex, and they adored Moroccans. "They say our skin glows with sunlight and desire. Can you imagine? Beautiful girls, available girls, and they aren't whores. You can talk to them like equals! Ali, you should really come to Nancy. With all my coursework and Communist Party meetings, there isn't much time for sex, but I manage… The only way I betray the Party is sexually. I never screw comrades. I prefer girls who aren't communists, I don't know why. Comrades, even the pretty ones, don't turn me on. It's true, I have a better time with a laboratory assistant or a sales girl at Monoprix than with a girl from the Party. They're less hung up, too; they don't have to be begged to suck and swallow; they adore it. I have a steady girl, Martine, and two or three I sleep with from time to time. They're nice, not complicated, direct, liberated, happy. It's not like here. Remember Khadija and Zina? What neuroses! Nothing but complexes and complications! 'Don't touch my hymen!' Well, thank goodness I never did. Otherwise, now I'd be stuck with two kids. I think Khadija finally managed to get hold of an Arabic professor, you know, the guy with the bifocals, the shy one. They got married, she left school, but he makes only a thousand one hundred and fifty-two dirhams a month; I saw his paycheck. Of course, I've seen Khadija again. I fucked her, as usual, but she wouldn't kiss me or suck me. She said she saves that for her husband! They're something else, those Moroccan girls. But you know what I like about her? When you're inside her, she squeezes her thighs together and rocks back and forth. It's right out of Nafzawi's
Perfumed
Garden
.
I'm sure that's where she got it.

"There are also Moroccan girls in Nancy," he went on. "I prefer the nonbelievers. They're willing to do anything, and they're good in bed. In France I do everything prohibited by our religion. I eat ham, I drink Bordeaux, I have sex with married women. I forgot to tell you that my regular girl is the wife of the university accountant. We get together at the end of the afternoon, when he's still at work. It's perfect. What about you and women? With your good looks, refinement, and good breeding, you must have a lot of success. It's true, I humor again), then read Lenin to me, whom he called "the genius." He smoked just as much as before, and said how happy he was to get back to his old, unexportable Favorites. His political activism monopolized most of his time. I was bothered by the fact that he was not at all interested in my film studies. The one time he mentioned it, he launched into a diatribe: American films helped destroy the culture of the Third World, John Ford was a racist, Howard Hawks was a manipulator, and Raoul Walsh was a one-eyed visionary.