The Elusive Fox, Page 6

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “We’ve been trying to find a place here, but with no luck. It’s cheap. We’ve heard a lot, I mean Helen and I, about the town of Dyabat. We met the others on the road, the world road, I mean, that long road where you get to meet all kinds of people and then leave them forever. How beautiful this life is, isn’t it, and yet so trivial?”

  “Here’s another crazy one,” I told myself. “Let’s test him.”

  “What you say makes sense. Death comes in the end, but people don’t realize it. We keep each other company on a dark road in order to achieve a goal. Once we get there, we make allowances, then go our own way, and each one meets his own destiny.”

  “But why isn’t the road bright?”

  “If it were,” I replied, “we wouldn’t need company.”

  He fell silent and took a sideways glance at the girl tapping on the drum. She was not paying any attention or even aware of his glances; the others were not paying attention either. They may have been talking, either inside, about, or to their own things.

  Susie came back with the gas stove and a blue teapot with a black bottom. She also brought a plastic water bottle and sugar cubes. She was wearing a red scarf, one edge of which hung between her breasts while the other was draped over her shoulder. The other girl was still drumming with the tips of her fingers, while the rest were in their own private worlds. The young German was certainly not in their world.

  “Can you prepare the bong for us?” he asked, looking at me excitedly.

  I pulled the gas stove close to me, then filled the teapot with water and let it boil. Actually, this was the first time I had prepared a bong. I had heard about the way to prepare things, but I was not sure about any of it.

  “Try doing it the same way they used with the Hiroshima bomb,” the fox suggested, “the way the first bomb was tested, the way every evil human intention has been tested throughout history.”

  “I’ll do it,” I told the fox calmly. When I noticed steam rising from the teapot, I added a handful of dry leaves. This time the group did not remain imprisoned in their own private worlds; instead they were all eagerly awaiting the result.

  “Shall we have it in cups,” Susie asked, “or straight from the teapot? Should we sniff it or drink it?”

  “No,” I told her, “we should drink it in cups, just like tea or coffee. I forgot to mention that.”

  “I’ll go and get some plastic cups from the car,” she said.

  I took the lid off the teapot; the leaves were changing color and bubbling slowly. Once the color had completely changed, the fox spoke to me.

  “Since you’re not sure of what you’re doing, that’s enough. Be careful. With every first experience you need to be careful. You need to bear in mind that the shepherd always stands behind the lamb or ewe.”

  I turned off the gas and waited for Susie to bring the cups. She did not take long. The fox instructed me to take the lead, so I complied. I poured a few drops into my own cup, then into the others’. They were all waiting for someone to start. I realized that no one was willing to risk his or her life. With a feigned self-confidence, I pretended that there was nothing unusual about what we were doing; it was all completely normal. We were simply drinking a plant with no particular effect; it might well make them feel happy and bring them close to that absolute joy they so desired. I had no idea whether such absolute happiness actually existed. They all looked hesitant; some of them kept sniffing the cups like animals that smell their food before devouring it. I did not sniff my own cup but brought it to my lips and took a small, noisy sip, albeit cautiously and with a certain anxiety. I noticed that some of them were still holding the cups close to their noses and lips without daring to take sip. I took a second loud sip, laughing and faking utter delight as I did so. Finally, one of them took a sip form his cup. When they asked him how it tasted, he told them it was terrific, very nice indeed. He took another sip. I made a point of taking very noisy sips, and eventually everyone else all did the same. It all proceeded naturally.

  “This beats coffee or tea,” one of them said.

  “Certainly,” one the girls agreed, “it tastes nice. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of this kind of bong.”

  “I will be watching you, you monkey!” I said without thinking.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “What are you saying?” the fox asked me. “Are you crazy? Talk to her in her own language.”

  “The bong’s great,” I told her. “In a while, you’re going to feel really happy. We’ll all be hovering over an amazing imaginary world.”

  “Is that true?” another of them asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  One of them lay down on the mat, unable to say another word; he was staring at nothing in particular, looking around aimlessly. Not long afterwards, the others were doing the same. One after another, they fell asleep. I too began to feel sleep coming on. My eyelids felt heavy. After taking a few more noisy sips, I put the cup down in front of me. I could feel something crawling over my body and head and taking control.

  “So this is the kind of effect the bong has on you,” I told myself. “It’s a strong sleeping pill. If I’d drunk my whole cup, I’d be asleep by now just like them.”

  I did not fall asleep but had a strange sensation unlike the one I feel when I drink wine, or smoke hashish or kif. I was left on my own in the room-hut. All around me and in front of me the “people of the cave” were sleeping. I felt scared. I listened as one of them snored like a pig. Another one was lying on his stomach and mumbling nonsense. I leapt to my feet as though I had been stung. As I charged out of the room, I knocked my cup with my foot and spilled everything. I wanted to ask the fox for help, but it had disappeared. I was surprised that it could let me down in a situation like this. I ran and ran; houses, trees, dirt, silence, voices, vacuum, wilderness, trees, sand, sea, sun. Amid the waves, I felt as though I were dragging a heavy bag. My soaking wet clothes felt heavy on me. I stumbled into the water, but in vain, trying desperately to recover my normal state so I could be rid of this crawling sensation and languor. Leaving the water, I felt utterly exhausted and threw myself down on the sand under the scorching hot sun. I had no sense of the people around me; instead I fell asleep and only woke up around dusk. There were a few human ghosts to be seen, moving far away along the beach. I looked all around me and began to muster a few of the pictures and images I had seen during my sleep; there were so many of them and they were so weird that I did not succeed. I could feel that my clothes were still wet. Shaking off the sand, I still did not feel cold. I walked to the village and found it almost deserted. I felt hungry and went to the store where the owner spotted me.

  “Were you at today’s farce?” he asked.

  “I’m starving.” I told him, “I need a casse-croûte or anything. I need food.”

  “You must have smoked a lot of hashish. Thank God you’re not one of those crazies. They wrecked the town.”

  “Who?”

  “Those hippies who arrived today. They must have used a bong. Everyone said that only the bong could make them do that.”

  “If that’s what they took,” I asked, “surely people knew how to bring them back to their senses, didn’t they?”

  The hippies had tried to set fire to some houses. One of them had jumped on an old woman, grabbed the knife she was using to clean a goat’s skin to make a canteen, and used it to rip the skin in pieces. He almost killed her, so she ran off and asked her son-in-law for help. Then the villagers came out and attacked the hippies with sticks. The hippies made for the woods like so many wolves. As I listened to this tale of the bong, I kept swallowing without chewing. If I had drunk all of my cup, I would have ended up like them.

  “Bravo!” I told the fox. “That’s great work you’ve done! That’s how I always want you to behave.”

  “Go check your things,” the fox instructed me, “and hitch a ride on the first kind of transport that arrives. Leav
e the village and head for Essaouira. Have a bottle of wine when you get there, but don’t smoke any hashish tonight. Things may end up badly. Make sure your lambs can hear your voice.”

  “A great idea,” I replied.

  I paid the store owner and left.

  7

  WAS IT FATIMA who had disappeared or had I? In a small store with a very old mat on the floor, there she was, sitting in the corner. There were a few other people sitting on the mat, eating and smoking hashish or kif. When she spotted me, she jumped up.

  “Ali!” she said. “I’ve missed you, handsome! Where have you been all this time? I left Essaouira for a few days and came back. I like this weather. It seems I can’t live anywhere else in the world. Come over and sit with us.”

  She pointed toward a young man who looked as though he came from a wealthy family. He was staring at me silently. His clothes were not dirty yet; no doubt, he was new to this lifestyle. We stepped over some feet and heads and sat down on the mat facing the young man.

  “This is Ali,” Fatima told him. “He’s a teacher in Casablanca.”

  The young man nodded his head without uttering a word. His red eyes kept staring the door of the store. He had obviously smoked a lot of hashish or maybe something even stronger. Maybe I was wrong; perhaps he was not a drug addict or from a wealthy family.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Fatima said.

  “I’m always in either Essaouira or Dyabat. Sometimes it’s better to disappear for a while so you can discover other worlds or your own self.”

  “That’s true,” she replied. “You’re always talking about complex issues, to the extent that humans can think logically about such things. I always remember the things you say. But don’t you actually think I’m stupid and don’t understand anything?”

  “I’ve never said that.”

  She turned to the young man who was still staring at the store door and the paint on the wall opposite.

  “Azeddine,” she asked him, “do you still have a joint?”

  The young man remained silent and frozen in place. Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, he calmly took out a pack of American cigarettes and something else and handed them to Fatima. At this point, the proverbial Hind fulfilled her promise even though she had never promised us anything, nor had we ever asked her for anything.

  “I don’t live in hotels anymore,” she told us. “I live in a house owned by Azeddine in the old Mellah. We have an enjoyable time there with some of his friends and a few other male and female drop-ins.”

  As usual, Azeddine stared silently at her. His hair hung down to his shoulders, black and clean. I remembered that I had not washed in a while; that is why I had not slept well and kept tossing and turning in bed—especially in the morning when the effects of alcohol and hashish wore off. I started scratching and felt extremely hot at specific spots on my body. I could also smell the sea blended with whatever my pores were discharging. Apparently Azeddine had a bathhouse inside the place that Fatima was talking about. He kept smoking heavily in front of me. The smoke inside the store had a hard time making it outside; it lingered, twisting and twirling in the darkened space.

  “Yesterday night was great,” Fatima continued, “wasn’t it, Azeddine?”

  Looking up, the young man finally said something.

  “Yes, it was,” he replied, “apart from that stupid Dutch girl who was trying to kill herself when she started banging her head against the wall. But we’re used to such things here.”

  “Are you from Essaouira?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he replied deliberately, “I’m from Essaouira, and the house where I live belongs to my grandfather. We live in Casablanca.”

  “You must be a student.”

  “Yes, I am. In French literature, but I don’t like it. There aren’t any decent teachers. If it weren’t for my handicapped mother, I’d have gone to France, Switzerland, or Belgium to study. But the poor woman keeps clinging to me because I’m the only boy in the family. All my four sisters are married. I only tolerate studying in Rabat for her sake. I don’t go to all the lectures. I prefer reading at home.”

  “That’s fine. Many geniuses were autodidacts. Departments of humanities don’t produce littérateurs.”

  “I’m well aware of that. When the break’s over, we’ll see. By then my mother may have died, and then I’ll go away to write a PhD on Jacques Audiberti’s drama.”

  Fatima stood up, and I watched her as she started yelling something by the door. The light inside the store turned dark, and a group of hippies, men and women, gathered around her. A woman passed by, enveloped in a hayik with only her left eye visible. She was using that single eye to stare at Fatima. No doubt she was saying to herself, “God forbid, what a whore! Prostitution should have its own rules: seclusion, prestige, pride, and a sense of honor, and so on . . .”

  Fatima came back inside trailed by a barefoot, dirty hippy with pants torn at the knee and his rear end on display like a white piece of fat.

  “This is Gunter,” she said. “He’s a nice young man.”

  “He was with us one night,” Azeddine said. “Stop bringing people like this. He’s crazy. We don’t want anything to do with lunatics.”

  “Hello!” Gunter said.

  He used a rubber band to tie up his ponytail. Azeddine did not respond to his greeting and turned in my direction.

  “These hippies are all we need!” he said. “If I’m going to be spending my own money, I need to know who I’m spending it on—certainly not people like this idiot. Some hippies are very smart; they can talk about everything, literature, art, and philosophy. But no one can understand what this man is talking about; it’s just that he can eat like a ravenous ghoul. Just imagine, that night he managed to eat the contents of an entire cooking pot without even washing his dirty nails.”

  “You’re right. I don’t like these hollow types either.”

  “But the poor guy’s kind and nice,” Fatima said.

  “Because he’s as ignorant as you are,” was Azeddine’s reply.

  I was surprised to hear him say that. I could see Fatima burning the store down on the spot and destroying everything. But the words were stuck in her throat. She simply sucked it all up and said nothing.

  “Aha!” I thought, “so here’s an example of human ambiguity: lion and ostrich, good and evil, courage and cowardice.”

  I remembered when she had told me that she was a Zemouri girl, and that I should never forget it. But with human nature the way it is now, there’s no more Zemouri, Doukkali, or Fassi. Human beings have just as much in common as they are different. Fatima had turned into a weak ewe in its postpartum period; she had surrendered to the shepherd. But I knew full well that she was hiding the viper inside her just as I was hiding my own fox, surveying everything going on with a quiet prudence. That trait is also to be found with foxes: a coward at times, withdrawing when it senses danger, but at others a ferocious assailant.

  “It’s okay,” I told Azeddine. “Let him stay with us until he makes up his own mind to leave. At any rate, he looks high enough!”

  “High or not,” Azeddine replied, “he’s not going to sniff any of my hashish. I’m prepared to spend all the capital from my father’s factory on smart people, but people like him make me uncomfortable. They’re simply a burden.”

  “Don’t tell me we’re going to take him home with us again.” Azeddine told Fatima.

  “I didn’t say that,” Fatima replied. “In any case, it’s not my house.”

  As the ewe made that statement, her masculine side disappeared. I now saw her as a real female. The image of her I had in my mind, the one from our first encounter, changed. Meanwhile Gunter was not paying any attention to what was going on between us. He kept looking around at the hippies inside the place who were either eating or smoking hashish. He waved at a girl in the distance, and she smiled back at him. He moved a little forward on the mat, and Azeddine moved back in disgust, looking at me in the h
ope that I shared his feelings.

  “What do you do?” I asked Gunter.

  “I’m touring the world,” he replied.

  “Did you quit school for that reason?”

  “I’ve been a student in a youth detention center,” he replied in broken French. “My last school was two years in an Iranian jail. I like the Iranian shah; he’s a great man. But jail there is brutal.”

  “Do you hear what this pig is saying?” Azeddine asked. “How can you learn anything from him?”

  “That’s okay.” I told Azeddine, “We should learn how to listen to everyone. From their mistakes, we can learn how to deal with our own.”

  “The very existence of such people on this planet of ours is a grave mistake.”

  “How do you know?” I asked him. “Maybe it’s our existence that’s the mistake, by which I mean the minority.”

  He let his thoughts wander through the smoke in the place. Without any further comment, he told Fatima to roll him another joint.

  “Oh! You’ve some hashish,” Gunter said with delight. “Great, fantastic!”

  “I swear to God,” Azeddine said in Arabic, “your lips are never going to touch this cigarette.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Fatima, “I’ll get rid of him politely.”

  “That’s your business.”

  But the way she sent him away was not very polite. “Gunter,” she told him, “I’ll see you later. We need to discuss some personal things now.”

  “Okay, okay,” he replied quite spontaneously. “I’ll see you at the Café Hippy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  Stepping over some heads and feet, he left the store. I heard Azeddine heave a sigh of relief.

  “Don’t do that again,” he told Fatima.

  “I didn’t realize you hated him.” she replied. “I won’t do it again.”

  “You know I like to choose my own friends.”

  “My apologies,” he said turning in my direction. “I don’t mean you. I’m talking that way about those hippies because I know them so well. You’re welcome to stay in my house. You shouldn’t worry. Food, booze, hashish, and girls are on me from now on. People like us are rare around here.”