For Bread Alone Read online

Page 2


  I began to be aware of certain differences between myself and the other boys of the neighbourhood, even though some of them were poorer than I. I had seen one of them pull chicken bones out of a garbage pail and suck them. The garbage here is good, he had said.

  I hear them talking among themselves about me.

  He’s a Riffian.

  They’re starving to death. They’re all criminals.

  He can’t even speak Arabic.

  The Riffians are all sick this year.

  The cows and sheep they brought with them are sick too.

  We don’t eat them. They’re the ones who eat them. Rotten people eat rotten meat.

  If one of their cows or sheep or goats dies, they eat it instead of throwing it out. They eat everything.

  The Djibli boy, as well as the Riffian boy, is an object of this kind of scorn, but the scorn is not expressed in the same way or with the same gestures. In general the Djibli is considered an oaf. ‘The treacherous Riffian and the gullible Djibli.’ I had heard people say it.

  Next to our house there is a small orchard. The big pear tree attracts me to it every day. Early one morning the owner of the orchard caught me poking a long pole into the tree and shaking the biggest and ripest pears from the branches. He drags me along the ground and I struggle to get free. At the moment I gave up hope, I felt the urine begin to run out of me into my wide Arab trousers. I was crying, even though he was not hitting me.

  His wife had a bright smile.

  This is the flea that’s been ruining our pear tree! he cried. He’s like a rat. He spoils more than he eats.

  Where’s your mother, my son? The woman’s voice was sweet, and it soothed my fear.

  She went to sell vegetables in the market, I sobbed.

  Stop crying. And your father?

  He’s in jail.

  In jail! Poor man. Why did they put him in jail?

  The question bothered me. She repeated it, caressing my cheek. Tell me. Why is your father in jail?

  I felt that a truthful reply would reflect upon the family name. I don’t know why, I said. My mother knows.

  A conversation followed between the man and his wife. Then their daughter appeared, barefoot, her head enveloped in a cloth, and her long fingers dripping with water. They were discussing the possibility of locking me up until my mother got back. I can see that the two women feel sorry for me. But the man, half in jest, half in earnest, wants me punished. He made me go into a dark room piled with old furniture. And don’t cry, you hear? he said as he shut the door. Or I’ll take this cane to you.

  It was the first time I had been shut into a room. I realized that not only those of my own family, but other people as well, had power over me. And then I understood that the big sweet pears belonged to the people who had imprisoned me. Why did we come all the way from the Rif when others stayed behind in their own country? Why does my father go to prison, and my mother go to sell vegetables, leaving me alone and with nothing to eat, when this man stays at home with his wife? Why can’t we have what other people have?

  Through a hole in the door I watched the girl as she gave the floor a vigorous scrubbing. She was still barefoot; her flimsy skirts were pulled up, revealing her thighs. As she bends over, I see her small breasts shaking back and forth. They appear and disappear inside the low-necked garment. As they tipped forward, the breasts moved like two bunches of grapes. The white cloth around her head, stained with henna, was like the outer leaves of a cabbage. I rapped on the door, softly, for I was afraid. I watched her, timing my heart to her movements. She turned towards the door, still bent over, still scrubbing. I imagined myself calling to her: Come and open this door! And I continued to call silently. Decide to come.

  She dropped the rag on the floor and stood up, shaking her hands. She put her hands on her hips and bent backwards, and a faint grimace of pain flickered over her face. Here she is, coming towards the door. My heart beat faster and I began to tremble. She opened the door. What do you want? Her voice was friendly.

  If my mother comes home and doesn’t find me there, she’s going to hit me, I began.

  She pulled her clothing down to cover her fleshy legs. For a moment she gazed at me with compassion. I looked back at her humbly. She buttoned up the neck of her garment and stood erect. I see the two dark grapelike points of her breasts through the gauzy white cloth.

  Are you going to knock the pears off our tree again with your pole?

  No. You can kill me yourself if you find me doing it again.

  She smiled. I did not dare to smile. She forgave me. Quickly I ran out. Behind me I heard her voice: Come here! Are you hungry?

  I hesitated, torn between two desires. Then I said: No.

  She understood the cause of my trembling, and insisted that I wait a moment. Her parents were not in the house. I looked at the pear tree, loving it and hating it. I was thinking that from then on I was not going to have any more of those sweet pears.

  She handed me a piece of bread that dripped with honey. Here. If you’re hungry come back to our house. Haven’t you got any shoes?

  No. My mother told me she was going to buy me some.

  She continued to look at me, smiling at me from where she stood. Before I had run out of sight I saw her wave to me. I smiled and waved back.

  Men are harder than women, I thought. I wished that the girl were my sister, and that the house and the orchard were ours. It also occurred to me that the man was not as bad as my father.

  He follows us wherever we go. He whispers words into her ear, but I cannot hear what they are. She walks ahead, leaving him behind. We cross to the opposite pavement, she holding my hand. Sometimes she pulls me along roughly. I see him, still following us doggedly. He is laughing. She is angry. I am unhappy.

  What does that man want? I asked her.

  Shut up!

  I look back at him and see him smiling. He goes on following us. What does this man want of my mother? Does he want to kidnap her? A kidnapper! No, he’s probably a thief. He looks bad.

  I held her hand tightly. Why are you squeezing my hand so hard? she demanded. I’m not going to run away from you.

  Go away! I shouted at him, furious. Allah inaalik!

  He’s smiling. He smiles at my mother and me, and I stare angrily into his face. I told you to shut up, she said.

  In my head I grew angry with her too. I try to take care of her and she tells me to shut up.

  She stopped to chat with a woman she knew. I saw the man going along, farther and farther away from us. The woman patted my head and ran her rough hand over my face. I let go of my mother’s hand so she would be free to talk, and wrapped my arms around her legs.

  Why is your Mohamed so unhappy? the woman asked my mother.

  My mother looked down at me and cupped the back of my neck in her hand. The gesture made me feel better.

  He’s always like this. He’s a strange boy.

  They said goodbye to one another. Kiss Lalla el Ouiza’s hand, my mother told me.

  Obediently I kissed the hard hand she held out.

  I noticed that my mother’s belly had begun to swell. Some days she does not go to the market. She stays at home, and she vomits now and then. She is pale and her legs are swollen. She sobs. Her belly swells and swells. I began to wonder if it would burst. I no longer noticed her sobs. Each day I am growing harder and gloomier. Hard, hard. Sad. I have forgotten how to play.

  One night, half asleep, I was carried to another house, where I fell asleep again in the midst of three other children. In the morning, the neighbour woman, whose husband had been killed in an accident at work a few days earlier, came to me and said: Your mother has a baby girl. Now you have a sister.

  Once a week my mother goes to see my father in the jail. Sometimes she comes back weeping. I began to understand that women cry more than men. They start and stop easily, like children. Sometimes they are upset when you think they are going to be pleased. And they laugh when you think they are go
ing to be angry. And often it’s hard to tell whether they are sad or happy. When are they going to laugh and when are they going to cry?

  I stay at home to take care of my sister Khemou. I know how to amuse her, but not how to make her stop crying. It bothers me finally, and I go outside. I leave her there crying, paddling her crooked arms and legs, like a tortoise on its back. When I go in the next time I find her asleep, or merely smiling. Usually asleep, while the flies buzz around her face, already irritated by mosquito bites. At night the mosquitoes and in the daytime the flies.

  My sister grows. Now my mother does not cry so much. She has fewer complaints. I am becoming meaner, sometimes with my mother and sometimes with the boys in the street. When I feel myself overcome, either by her or by them, I break things, or throw myself down screaming insults and hitting myself.

  She began to take me and Khemou to market with her. Khemou drinks at my mother’s breast. I usually look for my food far from either of them. Sometimes I beg and sometimes I steal.

  For the first time I dared say to her: If you don’t let me do what I want, some day I’ll go away from this house, and never come back.

  Aha, the beetle talking! If you’re like that already, what will you be like later?

  One morning as we walked through the Zoco de Fuera, my father bore down on us. He was on his way to find us, and he was with a woman who was going to show him where we lived now. My mother began to cry, there in the market. Why is she crying about him? I wondered. He’s like a wild animal, and he’s always in a bad temper.

  That night I fell asleep as they argued and wrangled. In the morning my mother did not go to the market. Instead she went to the hammam. Later I found her making up her face. She looked very happy. Then when my father went out I saw her crying again. I did not know any woman could cry so much. I decided to ask her what was the matter. She told me that my father had gone out to look for the soldier who had denounced him, and now they were going to kill each other.

  I hoped he would find the soldier so that we could go on living in the house without him. One of them would kill the other, and that was all I wanted. I like it when he’s absent, and hate it when he’s in the house.

  In the afternoon he came back dejected, giving off a smell of wine. I heard my mother say: You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?

  He mumbled a few words and sat down exhausted. He is sad because he has not found his enemy, and I am sad because he has come back.

  I heard them talking about a trip to Tetuan. They were still discussing it when I went to sleep. I woke in the night with a full bladder. The sound of kisses, like the clapping of hands. Hard breathing, tender murmurs. They like each other. I hate their love. Flesh clapping. Pfou! She tells lies. I’ll never believe her again.

  No. Not like that.

  What are they doing?

  Like this.

  No! No! It hurts. Like this. Like this. That’s better. No, no! Like this. Yes, that’s right.

  Breathing, kisses, groans, breathing, kisses, groans. They are biting each other. They are devouring one another, licking each other’s blood.

  Mmmmm!

  He’s stabbed her.

  A long soft moan.

  He’s killed her.

  I feel my bladder emptying itself. The warm liquid running between my thighs feels good.

  The day before we left for Tetuan I saw the girl who had given me the bread and honey. I told her about the trip we were going to make. She took me home to her house with her. There I ate brown bread with butter and honey. And she gave me a large apple, and filled my pockets with almonds. She washed my face and hands. Then she combed my hair for me and cut it, rubbing her fingers over my cheek as she did so, and put eau de cologne on me. She brought out a small mirror and told me to look into it. I obeyed, but I looked more intently at her than at myself.

  She took my head between her hands, the way I would have taken a small bird so as not to injure it. First she rubs my cheek tenderly and then she tickles it with her fingertips. When she said goodbye she kissed me on the cheek and then on the lips. She was a sister to whom my mother had not given birth.

  The day we left for Tetuan, I remembered Abdelqader’s grave. No one would put water on it, or sprigs of myrtle, and there were still no tiles around it. His grave will be invisible among all the others. It will get lost, the way little things always disappear among the big ones.

  2

  We had found a house by an orchard in the quarter of Aïn Khabbès. My mother went back to selling vegetables in the street. This suited my father, who liked nothing better than to sit in the garden of the Feddane, deep in conversation with the wounded veterans of the Spanish Civil War. I ran errands for our Spanish neighbours. My sister rolled on the floor and tried to learn to walk. Soon my father found me work in a nearby café. My day lasted from six in the morning until after midnight. Each month my father went and collected the thirty pesetas I had earned with my work. He did not give me any of it. He was using me, and I hated him for it, as I hated everyone who used others in this way. My father uses my mother and me. The man who runs the café uses me, too, since he makes me work longer than I should. But what can I do?

  I can steal. I can steal from anybody who uses me.

  I began to think of stealing as a way of regaining that which had been taken from me. The café had two separate clienteles, the daytime one and the night-time one, but on holidays they mingled. Then those of the daytime learned what went on at night, and those of the night-time asked for news of the daytime. I smoked in secret. The first time I ate a piece of majoun I fainted. Later I vomited what looked like moss. I went on being sick for several days, and life looked strangely different during that time. Illness makes one more alone. I understood that I was only I, face to face with myself.

  The men in the café encouraged me to smoke kif and eat majoun. Daytimes it was kif and work, but at night it was majoun and fun. One of them said: It’s only the first time you take it that you throw up. He was right. I never felt sick again. Then when I drank wine for the first time, and was immediately ill, they told me the same thing about wine. The smokers and drinkers are always right. I had no trouble the second time I tried wine. The café owner saw nothing strange about a twelve-year-old boy who got drunk and smoked kif. He too drank and took hashish. I knew that what interested him was making money.

  Some nights I slept on a bench in the café. Other times it was at the Spanish bakery nearby. One night I watched the workers amuse themselves. Five or six of them took hold of Yazidi the baker and got him to the floor. They gagged him with a handkerchief so he could not bite them. Then one of them let down his trousers and, squatting over Yazidi, began to rub his buttocks, his scrotum and his sex against Yazidi’s nose. Since I was afraid they might do the same thing to me, I decided to get out of the bakery quickly. The dangers of the streets on the way home were preferable, even though the distance seemed great at night when it was dark, and I was frightened.

  The café owner lived in a house that was built against the café. Sometimes he would start to get drunk there, and go on to finish his spree at a brothel in Tetuan where he would stay until the next day, or even two or three days if he went to a brothel in another town. During this time his absence made it possible for me to indulge my taste for thievery.

  I got into the habit of going into his house whenever I felt like it, and eating at table with his sons. When I was drunk, I slept at the café, otherwise I slept in the same room with them. I saw that the man beat his wife and children the same way as my father did. Even so, he was less bestial. Several times I saw him kiss his sons, and he held long, calm conversations with his wife. My father could speak only in shouts and slaps. Sometimes I did not go home to see my parents for more than a week. This way I escaped from the discord and wrangling.

  I grew very thin and sickly. I saw that my mother’s belly was swelling again, and I thought to myself: This time I’m not going to stay at home to take care of the baby that�
��s going to come out. The belly grows, the time of screaming comes nearer. One day there it will be. Ouaaaaah! I stopped working. During the days while I was getting well, I spent my time catching birds in the orchard. I made a swing out of a heavy rope and hung it from a tree. Surprise! The swing gives me a delicious sensation. My sex stands up all by itself when I climb onto the swing. In the orchard there was a big tank full of water, and there I learned to swim. Early in the morning I would go out and look for things to steal: fruit, eggs, or hens. Whatever I found I sold to the baqal in our quarter. Each day the sight of certain living creatures produced great excitement in me: hens, goats, dogs and calves. Many hens died as a result of my experiments. I would have to muzzle a dog, or tie up a calf, but there was no need to take such precautions with a goat or a hen, and these were more satisfactory. I began to have pains in my chest, and mentioned them. They told me: You’re growing up, that’s all. I have a disturbing sensation in my nipples and in my sex, and when I squeeze the milk out of my sex, I feel as if I were being torn to pieces inside my body.

  One morning I climbed a fig tree, and through its branches I saw Asiya, the daughter of the man who owned the orchard. She was coming along slowly towards the tank. Bad luck, I thought. She’s going to see me up here, and tell that father of hers. He’s like my father; he never smiles. She looked this way and that, stopped walking, and listened to the sounds around her. Then she continued hesitantly, looking in every direction as she went, taking her steps with great care. She untied the sash of her pyjamas and pulled off the jacket like a bird getting ready to fly. The whiteness of her skin burst forth. Again she turns and looks around. She is not in a hurry. She seems to be listening for something. I am overcome by anxiety. One fig falls out of my hand, and the one in my mouth suddenly goes down my throat. The basket leans to one side, and half the figs fall out. The sun has already appeared. The circle of red on the shining white mist of the sky was like an egg that had been broken onto a blue plate. The animals and birds and insects have begun their morning praise of Allah. When a donkey brays, its sound drowns out the songbirds, doves and roosters. She is undressing. Asiya, she is taking everything off. Her pyjamas slide down like a curtain falling. She’s all undressed. Asiya, she’s naked. Asiya’s naked. How bright she is! Full breasts, their points protruding. Below, black hairs outline a triangle. My trousers are too tight. They hurt in front. She takes two slow steps towards the tank. My discomfort in front grows worse and worse. Her long hair covers her from behind. She stoops over, and I am afraid she may break in two. Now her hair falls forward over her shoulders and no longer hides her back. Below the point where her white flesh divides there is a slight darkness. My mouth tastes as though I had been eating honey, and every part of me itches. My nipples ache and my trousers hurt. A sweet seizure, a feeling of release, and then delicious relaxation. I’m going to fall out of the tree. I almost fell. She still hesitates, then she steps into the water. The stone steps are slippery. I am afraid she may fall. I worry. She looks at the water and all around at the orchard. She scoops up water to her armpits and lets it run down. She lets it run over her breasts, and splashes a little between her thighs. Then she pours it over her head and jumps in.