The Last Friend (5 page)

A city of seduction, Tangier lashes you to its eucalyptus trees with the old ropes left by sailors at the port; it pursues you as if to persecute you; it obsesses you like an unrequited love. We talked and talked about Tangier. We knew that without our city, our lives would be meaningless. We needed to know what was going on there, even though we knew that nothing really earthshattering ever happened. Tangier was like an ambiguous encounter, a clandestine affair hiding other affairs, a confession that doesn't reveal the full truth. It was like a family that poisoned your existence as soon as you got away from it. You knew you needed it, without being able to say why. Tangier, the city that had given birth to my friendship with Mamed, harbored an instinct for betrayal.

I told Mamed the latest gossip, and I was amused because I knew how much he missed it all. Brik had married Ismael's widow. Fatima had been abandoned by her husband after an affair with a young French official. The Regnault high school had been repainted. The Cervantes Theater was still run down. Allen Ginsberg had passed through town to see his friend Paul Bowles, and they were seen smoking marijuana at the Cafe Hafa.The French-language newspaper, the
Journal de Tangier,
had changed hands. The Lux Cinema was closed for repairs. The Mabrouk had been demolished in order to build a new nondescript building in its place. Tangier had not had a governor for six months, and nobody noticed. King Hassan had promised to visit Tangier, but no one believed him.

Hastily constructed new buildings had gone up, though they were uninhabited, and no one knew who owned them. The American Consulate had closed. Riots had broken out in the working-class area of Beni Makada. Barbara Hutton's house had been sold. Yves Vidal had given a big party in his palace in the casbah, while his friend Adolfo had celebrated the construction of a swimming pool on the roof of his house with yet another memorable dinner. Tennessee Williams drank so much one night that he fell asleep on a doorstep of the Rue Siaghine. I caught a glimpse of Jean Genet at the Cafe de Paris. Francis Bacon bought every kind of alcohol he could find at the Epicerie Fine market. A turf war among drug dealers had left three dead at the port. Momy was getting thinner and thinner, driving around town in a pink Cadillac with an overly made-up blonde in the back seat. I saw Hamri in a cafe, and he assured me that his paintings would be worth a fortune after his death. Ramon was still in love with his Moroccan wife, and had become a true Muslim, to the chagrin of his Spanish family.

The Hotel Minzah had been sold to an Iraqi. There was supposedly an Interpol warrant out on him. The Cafe de Paris had new furniture; the Porte Tea House was still closed. A new radio station had started up. The Rif Hotel was barely staying in business. The Colonnes bookstore was still in the same place. So was the Claridge, though the cafe was not as good as it used to be. The wind from the east had been particularly strong this summer. Gibair no longer flew from Tangier to Gibraltar. There were only four Indians left in the whole city; two of them had a shop in the Socco Chico, in the medina, and the other two sold watches on the Boulevard Pasteur in the new part of town. The Siaghine church had closed its doors. The synagogue nearby was still open, but had only a few visitors…

Tangier has lots of new neighborhoods, buildings constructed with no planning, no trees, gardens, or parks. If you saw that, Mamed, you would be upset. King Hassan came through town without stopping; his train dropped him off at the port, where he took the boat to Libya. People waited for him all day long, in the heat, burned in every sense. Elizabeth Taylor celebrated her birthday in Malcolm Forbes s palace in the casbah. And me? What about me? Well, I'm still teaching. I got a small promotion, five hundred dirhams more a month, sent to a new school. Now I'm at a teacher's training school in Tangier.

I never celebrated MY birthday, but Mamed always sent me a card and a present, usually a record or a book. We were born the same year; he was three months older. When he moved to Sweden, the tradition ended, which seemed perfectly normal to me. It was part of the change in the tone of our friendship. It had become both more essential and less a part of everyday life, on standby, waiting to prove it had not lost its intensity. One day, Mamed called asking me to check on his sick mother as soon as possible. He wanted me to see if her condition really warranted a trip back from Sweden. He told me that his brother often exaggerated the state of his mothers health, to make him feel guilty-the sort of thing that happens in families. Would I go and see her, talk to her doctor, and report back to him? He had more confidence in me than in his brother; I was more objective. He said he would call at the same time the next day. He added that he had spoken with his father, who was much less dramatic about it all, but perhaps because his father worried any time Mamed got on an airplane.

In fact, his mothers condition was extremely worrisome. Her diabetes was out of control. She barely ate anymore, but her blood sugar was high. She had all kinds of complications, she no longer recognized anyone, and the doctors couldn't do anything more for her. I told Mamed to come home immediately. He arrived two days later. At that point, his mother was a little better, and he looked at me as though I had misrepresented her condition to get him to come back to Tangier. Mamed was his mother's favorite, and she was waiting for him to come home so she could die in peace. She told him so, and then died in his arms. Mamed hugged me and cried, asking me to forgive his doubts about my judgment.

Ghita, seven months pregnant, had remained in Stockholm. I took care of the funeral arrangements as if they had been for my own mother. Mamed was profoundly affected, crying and expressing guilt about having been absent for so long, something his brother did not hesitate to point out. He stayed with us during that week in Tangier. Something about him had changed, though I was not sure what. He still smoked as much as before, and he drank a lot. He had found some cheap cigarettes in Sweden, had become thinner, and spoke passionately about the Scandinavian welfare state. It was a real democracy, he said, without corruption, without lies from the government, no beggars in the streets, very few alcoholics. The Scandinavian sense of civil rights was the stuff of dreams for an Arab or Mexican, he told me, and immigrants were given the opportunity to learn Swedish, to have decent housing, and to be a citizen like anyone else. What shocked him, he said, was that despite all this, the Swedish still complained about their system. They talked about the corruption in industry, for example, or complained that social security did not take care of everything. They would point out that old people were not treated well in the hospitals, citing the story of an elderly couple so unhappy with their medical care that they wrote a letter of complaint, then got in a boat and drowned themselves off the coast of Gothenburg. "Imagine if all the sick people in Morocco did that. There would be no one left!"

And yet he missed Morocco. "I miss the smells, the morning scents, the sounds, the nameless faces we see every day, the warmth of the sky and the people. I'm really torn. My working conditions are ideal. I'm well paid, even though more than half my salary goes to taxes. My child is being raised in a country with real justice, where he has the right to disagree with the government, to speak freely, to believe in God or not as he chooses. He is free, but is he happy? Maybe I'm transmitting my doubts to him. Ghita is very happy. She's made friends; there are lots of radical women who do charity work-she volunteers for an organization that helps exiles.

I'm the one who's dying of boredom. I miss Tangier. I hate to admit to this ridiculous nostalgia. You know what I miss the most? Our discussions in the Cafe de Paris and the Cafe Hafa. I'm not the only one. Whenever I meet other Moroccans in Sweden, the only thing they talk about is Morocco. They think nothing has changed. It's nostalgia. They find spices in the Iranian and Turkish markets and make
tagines
."

"Moroccans in Sweden are never satisfied," he continued. "They forget that Sweden has given them a chance to remake their lives. But I'm sure if they came back to Morocco, they wouldn't last more than twenty-four hours. They are completely screwed up. I don't want to be like them, so I'm going to come home at least twice a year. I have to find a balance between that country, with its ideal democracy and this one, with its widespread corruption. There has to be a balance between Sweden 's justice and this country's sleazy compromises, between Scandinavian solitude and invasive Mediterranean communality. It's a question of bridging the gap. The trick is not to lose your cultural identity while you take advantage of real democracy. Remember, the Swedes lost their prime minister, Olof Palme, precisely because he was so accessible to ordinary people. He was gunned down walking out of a movie theater. How different is that from Morocco? Here even an obscure deputy minister would never be seen in public without his bodyguards. Traffic stops; sirens blare. These people despise ordinary citizens."

Before he left Tangier, Mamed went to see my parents. He examined my father, who was having trouble breathing, and prescribed some medicine, wondering out loud whether it would be available in Moroccan pharmacies. If not, he offered to send it from Sweden. My mother gave him a box of little cakes she had just made, insisting: "They're good, especially in the winter. Take them with you. I hope you like almond. And look, take these two rolls, fresh from the oven. Homemade bread is good. I'm sure your mother used to pack food for you. I've always done that for my children. It's important to eat well. Come back and see us. If you need anything, remember you have a home here, too. Come here, my son, so I can embrace you and give you my blessing." Mamed's eyes filled with tears. He hugged my mother and promised to return.

We received a package from Mamed with the medicine for my father, a pretty cashmere shawl for my mother, and a pen for me. Soon after, Mamed's second child was born. He called him Yanis, telling me over the phone that it was like Anis, Arabic for companion, but it was also the Greek name for John. "He's a little Swede who will make his life here. It's different for me. I'm too old to start over, so I go through the daily motions, do my job well. I no longer try to bridge the cultural gap between Sweden and Morocco. I'm tired. I'm still thinking about whether or not to have Yanis circumcised. It's supposed to be better in terms of hygiene. Now don't get any ideas from those old Fez families who kidnap little boys and have them circumcised without their parents' knowledge. I'm only telling you this because I know you could do it. By the way, say hello to Ramon for me."

I finally convinced Soraya to adopt a child. We went through the usual procedures, legal and illegal. It took six months, and then, one day, my Rif Mountain friend Azulito (his nickname came from his blue eyes) brought me a birth certificate and another legal document confirming the adoption of our son, Nabil. We had to lie, telling everyone that Soraya had had a difficult pregnancy, and that she'd been confined to bed rest for the last six months. We didn't tell anyone he was adopted. That was the price we had to pay for Soraya to reclaim her zest for life, her inner peace, her easy disposition. I told Mamed the truth. He sent Soraya a magnificent bouquet of flowers.

The next summer, Mamed came to see us with gifts for Nabil. He had changed a great deal physically and coughed all the time, claiming it was air pollution. He had good cough drops, he said, but he had left them at home.

Once again, we fell right back into our old summer routine-meeting at the Cafe de Paris in the morning and Cafe Hafa in the afternoon. We talked and joked about everything. But one evening, while we watched the sun set on the Spanish coast, he suddenly became serious. "I think I've made a mistake," he said. "I never should have left Morocco for Sweden. I'm lost. I've seen how you can live differently, and in many ways better than here, but it's not my culture, not my traditions. My wife and children have adapted better than I have. I'm depressed there, unhappy here, dissatisfied everywhere. The whole thing has been a failure. I'm not well. My children don't speak a word of Arabic, even though they're supposed to have learned it at school. They think of Morocco as a vacation place.

I don't want to grow old in Sweden. I think I'm going to come back. They need lung specialists here. What I would really like to do is retire early and come home. I doubt my wife and children will join me, but we all have our own paths to follow." He punctuated his words with a nervous, dry cough. I had given up talking to him about his health. He was certainly well qualified to know what was going on inside his lungs.

Soraya seemed happy, and she no longer got angry over little things. Nabil was growing up in a peaceful household. I had no complaints about my wife, but I still felt the need to have a secret affair with Lola, an Andalusian woman who worked at the Spanish consulate. I didn't feel I was betraying Soraya, and had no guilt whatsoever. Lola looked as if shed stepped out of a Modigliani painting. She lived in her own world. She said she did not belong to anyone, and that she preferred romance to friendship. In fact, her sensuality attracted many lovers. I first met her with Tarik, a physical therapist, probably the only openly gay Moroccan in Tangier.

Well aware of her charms, Lola was always the one to make the first move. In the beginning, I tried to resist. I liked her, but I had long since given up on sexual relationships that weren't going anywhere. Yet I felt a strong desire to respond. Why mire myself forever in the pseudo-comfort of a routine life? After a while, I realized that I had gone along out of a desire to imitate Mamed, not to upset him. I had decided to remain faithful to my wife and not give in to carnal desire. Yet I was bored with the routine of it all, the nights Soraya and I would have sex, the nights she had headaches, the nights I went out with my male friends. I couldn't stand this routine any more. The temptation of risk and adventure became too great. I didn't say anything to Mamed about this when I gave him the latest news from Tangier. When he asked about me, I told him everything was fine, Soraya was fine, there was nothing to report.