For Bread Alone Read online

  I climb down from the tree and creep along the ground until I reach the pyjamas, which I seize and quickly hide among the bushes. Then I crawl again to the tree and climb back up, waiting and grinning. I devour the figs greedily, delighted with my game. She swims beautifully. The way she plunges beneath the surface and bobs up again reminds me of a wild duck. I had heard about the swimming prowess of mermaids, and it seemed to me that she was like one of them. She is on her belly, her back, now on one side, now the other. She pushes to the bottom of the pool, and comes up dancing like an empty bottle on top of the water. What a delight it is that she should not know I am here, that she should imagine herself completely alone!

  She climbs out shivering, stares in astonishment, and begins to search wildly for her pyjamas, darting this way and that distractedly. When she sights them, she puts them on and dashes through the orchard. I am left laughing in the tree, but once again a donkey covers all sounds with his braying.

  In the night I dreamed of Asiya, still unfastening her belt, still floating naked and darting like an eel along the bottom of the tank. I was swimming along with her, above her, below her and on both sides of her. We stood upright in the water for a moment, kissed and sank.

  A little girl named Mounat pulled up her dress, crouched, and made water. She did not know I was watching. I wondered why her pink thing had no hairs around it. It was not pretty when she squatted down: it was as ugly as a toothless old mouth. And I saw our neighbour Saida changing her clothes. Her belly sticks out, not something you would want to touch. Her breasts are flabby. So much hanging flesh disgusts me. Things became clearer. I begin to make comparisons between beautiful things and ugly ones. It seemed to me that unless women had bodies like Asiya’s, they were ugly.

  I am bothered every day by my sex. I scratch it slowly with my fingers as if it were a pimple not yet ready to burst. Then it fills and grows hard, until it is sweating and panting. Unless I reach pleasure during my reverie, I feel pain like two stones. I conjure up the picture of Asiya’s body. Never have I seen anything so lovely and desirable. I kiss her, suck her breasts, and she caresses me with her hands and her lips. I imagine her, I keep imagining her, I maintain her picture in the dream by an effort of will, until the liquid is forced out and I disappear into delight.

  When I told Asiya that it was I who had hidden her pyjamas, she chased me. I can jump over things that she has to go around. I turned to look. She had almost caught up with me. I stumbled and fell, and she fell on top of me. I tried to get up, but she had hold of me. Again we rolled on the ground. Then she stopped the game, looking suddenly ashamed. I thought: I too am going to be stronger than a woman.

  I use up a great many boxes of matches pursuing my newest pastime. I sit on the edge of the tank and wait for the eels to come out of the crevices at the bottom of the tank. I twist five or six wax matches together, light them, and throw them at the moving eels. Still tossing matches, I follow their frantic course until they wriggle back into their holes. The sight of the small flames falling in the air together with the undulating movements of the eels, these things calm my resentment and anxiety.

  I sat there now as usual, tossing bunches of matches into the water. One bunch fell out of my hand before I was able to throw it. I made another bunch and lighted it, without looking to see what had become of the first, which had landed on the ground. Next I heard the sound of canes crackling. I tried to put the fire out by throwing rocks at it, but it only blazed higher. Then I ran and hid in the stable. I heard voices crying for water, and burrowed deeper into the hay, pondering my bad luck. When night came, I crept into the stall where the cows slept. I made one of them stand up, and I patted her head and smoothed her hide. Then I rubbed her udder, and she let me suck on it. After three days of fear and watchfulness in the lanes and alleys of the quarter, and three nights of milk-sucking in the security of the stable, I fell into the trap my father had set for me. The neighbours had to break the bolt on our front door in order to deliver me and my mother from the blows of his military belt. My body was covered with bleeding welts, and one of her eyes was swollen shut. It was many nights before I could find a comfortable position to sleep in. I longed to be able to sleep in the air. My wounds hurt, my bones ache, and I can feel the fever burning in my head.

  I went back to get drunk and smoke kif in the café. There I saw Fatima, the café owner’s daughter, bending over as she did the washing, with her clothing hitched up under her sash in front. She seemed older now, and bigger and stronger than I, and I looked at her with longing. My father’s rough treatment of me always served only to increase the rage of my desire. The girl turned towards me with a smile. I looked at her, and in my mind’s eye I see a gust of wind arrive, and lift her filmy garments. Asiya is prettier than she is. But Fatima is in front of me. She stood up straight and stretched. Then she put her arm behind her back, wincing a bit. I was staring wistfully at her full bare thighs. Quickly she let her skirts fall to cover her knees.

  I imagined myself going over to her and slapping her in the face. Then I would pull the skirt up again, and she would yank it down angrily. I would hit her again and lift it up. She would scream with rage, and I would set her clothes on fire. The flames as they burned her underwear delighted me.

  Suddenly she demanded: What is it?

  Disappointed, I said: There’s no more sugar in the café.

  She looked at me piercingly. Don’t you know where we keep the sugar?

  I glared at her.

  What’s the matter with you today? she said, staring at me. I did not reply, and she added: You’re strange today.

  I went into the storeroom with my head bent over, and came out with the sugar. She was still studying me with concern.

  I began to invent reasons for going into the house when she was there alone. Using the fire of my imagination I found that I was able to undress her whenever I liked. She grew used to my unnecessary arrivals, and I to her feigned indifference. We hypnotized one another, each looking into the other’s eyes. At this point we spoke very little. Our mutual understanding grew, intensified.

  One cold night I found my body warming itself beside hers, and she said nothing. We warmed one another and slid on top of each other, face over face, face under face. I slap her cheek to hear the sound it makes. I bite her so her blood will run out. I pretend to stab her, in order to hear the groan I had heard my mother make. And for the first time I understood that girls had something wonderful and delicious, and that, whatever it was, I needed it.

  My mother gave birth to a baby. Little sister Khemou was growing big enough to take care of little brother Achor. One evening at the café I was smoking kif and getting drunk on wine, sitting outside the door in the fresh air. When my eyes were open I saw the stars in the sky, and when they were shut I saw the stars in my head. The café keeper noticed me sitting there, and said with annoyance: Serve that man a glass of water.

  I looked at him dreamily, and in my mind cursed him. The son of a whore! The stars in my head went out. I said: And you? What are you doing here? Give it to him yourself.

  He slapped my face. Then he spat at me. I began to laugh without control. One of the kif-smokers cried: Can’t you see he’s kiffed and drunk?

  That was my last night at the café. I went off into the dark with the night birds whistling in my head, feeling both light and heavy. Walking on the earth was like flying. I was not afraid of the cane-brakes along the road, or of the horrors that might be behind them. In order to feel even drunker I began to sing:

  Ya Tetuan, ma ahlak

  Tol omri ma ninsak

  Tol hayatia ahouak.

  I came across a cat, or maybe a rabbit, as I ran in the darkness through the narrow lanes. It could have been a djinn pretending to be a cat for all I cared.

  About a week after the Aid el Kebir I went with my mother to the stream that ran at the bottom of the orchard. She wanted to wash the hide of the sheep we had sacrificed. Later, when we were at home that night, she
exclaimed: Allah! I left the knife down there on the rock. The one I was scraping the sheepskin with.

  I said nothing, but ran out through the orchard to the stream. I found the knife, and seized it as if I were going to throw it at an adversary, at the same time glancing across to the other bank of the stream. And I saw a djinn advancing towards the water. Like everyone else, I knew that if you see a djinn, you must pierce the earth with a steel blade where you stand. With a violent gesture, I threw the knife downward. I tried to run, but my knees failed me. I fell and got up again. I could neither cry out nor turn my head. It seemed to me that if I turned and looked, I would see the monster beside me. I kept slipping and falling and getting up again, until I reached the house, my heart in my throat. As a result I fell ill, got worse, and actually came near to dying. An old man visited the house, a specialist in exorcizing evil spirits from human bodies. The old man accomplished a miracle. He told my mother to sacrifice a black rooster and to carry me seven times around the well in the courtyard. In this way I began after a few days to return to my normal self. When I was well again I told my friends what had happened. All of them believed me implicitly. Both the older and the younger ones knew all about djenoun. In those days one thing could all too easily turn into another. Whatever djinn might appear, or whatever mere hallucination suggest itself to them, they understood that it came from Allah in direct accordance with their own personal merit or lack of it.

  My father now found me a new job in a brick factory, where I earned twenty-five pesetas a week, pushing a wheel-barrow full of clay or bricks back and forth for eight or nine hours a day. At first my hands were covered with blisters. Later the blisters turned into callouses. My face became hard and my body strong.

  I left the brick factory and went to work at a pottery kiln. It was the same sort of work, pushing a wheelbarrow, and the work day was just as long, although this time it was I who collected my wages. I gave half to my father in return for my food, lodging and laundry. But I was tired of wheelbarrows. I’m not a donkey, I told my mother when my father could not hear us. Anybody who goes on all his life hauling loads up and down must be a donkey.

  And what are you going to do?

  I know what I’m going to do, I said.

  At lunchtime my father told me: Food costs money in this house. Unless you work, you’ve got no food or bed here. You understand?

  I bowed my head and said: Yes. But inside I said: And you? What do you do? Isn’t it my mother who does the work?

  I left the kiln and bought the things I needed in order to be a bootblack. I frequented cafés and bars, stood outside doorways, and gathered cigarette butts. I drank the dregs from the wine glasses and ate the tapas that were left over on the little plates. The men complained that I gave them a bad shoeshine. It was clear that I had not mastered the craft. Usually the brush fell to the pavement when I changed hands. And the hostility of the other bootblacks bothered me. I became friendly with a newsboy who was about my age. Then I stopped shining shoes and, like him, began to hawk the daily paper El Diario de Africa.

  3

  We moved to the quarter called Trancats, and I began to help my mother sell her vegetables and fruit. My work consisted of shouting in a strident voice at the passers-by:

  ¡Vamos a tirar la casa por la ventana!

  ¡Quien llega tarde no come carne!

  ¡De balde! ¡De balde vendo hoy!

  Each afternoon I managed secretly to put aside some money with which to buy majoun and kif. Occasionally I had enough to go to the cinema. One day my friend Tafersiti and I decided to visit a brothel. We drank half a bottle of mahia sitting on a wall by the barracks above the Medina.

  Lalla Harouda, considered by the boys to be the best whore from whom to learn about sex, came up to us. You’ve had a lot to drink, haven’t you? she said. Tafersiti looked at me. I explained that we were only a little happy. She examined us, an amused expression on her face, and we both were afraid she was not going to let us in.

  Well, who’s going to go first? she said. I looked at Tafersiti. You go in, he told me.

  She wanted the money in advance. I gave it to her without hesitation; it seemed natural that she should have asked for it.

  She is selling and I am buying.

  She began to take off her clothes, a cigarette hanging from her fleshy lips. The smoke curled upward and made her squint. She turned to me. Open your mouth, she said. She smiled and thrust the cigarette between my lips. Then she turned her back on me, and I unbuttoned her brassiere, my eyes on the sparse hairs in the furrow between her buttocks. She faced me, still smiling, the brassiere dangling from her hand, and took the cigarette from my mouth. I smiled back at her, thinking: She used my lips as an ashtray.

  Smoke, she told me. Don’t you smoke? Nervously I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Take off your clothes, she said.

  My trousers stood out in front. With agitation I unbuttoned my fly. My heart was pounding. Still no one had a body as beautiful as Asiya or Fatima, but with them it had been only a superficial and slippery contact. This one will let me go into her the way a knife goes into living flesh. I am going to stab what is between her thighs.

  She lay back on the bed like a pair of scissors and opened her blades. It was shaved. I remembered Mounat as she crouched and piddled. The legs spread wider now. She seized my sex in her hand.

  And suppose it has teeth in it, I thought. I approached her openness with misgivings, then felt the scissors squeezing my legs. She hugged me to her.

  You don’t even know yet how to get into a woman.

  She wet her fingers on her tongue and moved her hand down to the other mouth. Put it in now.

  I hesitated.

  What’s the matter? Go on.

  I thought: And if it should have teeth?

  Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to eat you.

  Cautiously I entered her, sinking into her slippery mouth. Sometimes I lost it and could not find it again.

  Ay, ay, ay! Not that way!

  I remembered my mother telling my father: Not like that! Like this!

  So this is the first time you’ve been with a woman!

  I get into her once more. I want her lips and she offers me her cheek. I manage to get hold of her breasts. She objects, and pulls my hand away.

  Ah! Ah! Not like that! That’s my flesh you’re squeezing. You’re too young to try that sort of thing. This is your first time.

  Fatima is prettier than Lalla Harouda, who won’t even let me touch her breasts. She let me have her lips and her breasts too.

  The slippery massage by Lalla Harouda did not last very long. Come on, she said. You’re through. She pushed me away from her. My sex was still dripping.

  Oh, not like that! she cried. You’re messing up my bed. Wait. Let me show you.

  She spread a handkerchief over her wound. I was thinking of her buttocks. It’s true, I said to myself. She’s a real professor.

  There you are. You’ve slept with your first woman. Isn’t that true? I’m the first, no?

  I nodded my head.

  You’ll always remember me, she told me.

  I smiled at her, feeling that she liked me. My snake was still standing. I wanted it to leave its venom inside once again.

  Well, what are you waiting for? Wash and put your clothes on. Hurry. Your friend’s waiting for his turn.

  I put my trousers on. They pushed against my sex. It lay down and then stood up again.

  How was it? said Tafersiti.

  Wonderful! No teeth!

  What? She hasn’t any teeth?

  I’m not talking about her mouth. Her hole doesn’t bite. You’ll see. It’s warm and soft.

  You there! she shouted from the room. Come on inside.

  I was thinking: It’s not good to look at it, but it feels good. It warms your whole body, and makes you calm and clear-headed. But it’s better to do it without looking.

  Tafersiti and I would go to the brothel three or four times a week to look for a n
ew woman. Then we would both have her. They all acted more or less the same way in bed: Come on! Hurry up! We went back to the ones who would allow us to fondle their breasts and kiss them, and who would let us take our time.

  If they won’t let you do that, I told Tafersiti, you’re only getting half a piece.

  They only let the older ones, he said.

  And are we so young?

  The women think we are, anyway.

  Why don’t we go and look at the Spanish women this afternoon?

  Good. We’ll see what it’s like with them.

  The first girl we met there would not take us. Uno solamente, she insisted. Nada de dos.

  Only one of us can go, I explained to Tafersiti.

  Go in with her, if you want, he told me.

  No. We’ll both go, or neither one of us.