The Last Friend (4 page)

Mamed decided to go back to medical school in Rabat, the capital. I decided to give up film studies to enroll in the Faculty of Arts, and major in history and geography. "It's the writing of the Earth," one of our professors said, explaining the word "geography." He added that the Earth also writes the story of humanity.

Student activism was widespread, but Mamed and I no longer wanted to be involved. We were considered "veteran conspirators," and the secret police watched our every move. Mamed trusted no one. That didn't stop him from spending time with a guy who was short, ugly, and dirty, but intelligent. This guy was curious about everything, and he went out of his way to help Mamed. I had a bad feeling about him. He was too friendly to be honest. I asked him about his job. He was vague and secretive. He claimed to work for an advertising company. In fact, he was really a cop. We found this out later when the Ministry of the Interior appointed him head of the censorship bureau. The whole thing made Mamed sick. He couldn't get over it. He was mad at himself for having been taken in. "To think he talked to me about Kant, Heidegger, film, and art, plus he was such an ardent critic of the government and the police!" Later, this spy made a career in intelligence. His dream was to be a writer. He wrote a few lines of poetry, published them at his own expense, and distributed them to government agencies. On a Moroccan television show, he was introduced as a promising young Francophone writer.

The undercover agent had clearly been jealous of our friendship. Mamed listened to him without taking him seriously, but continued seeing him, until the guy made the mistake of criticizing me and my family.

Mamed married ghita even before he finished the course-work for his medical specialization in pulmonology. His parents were upset, and they asked me to do my best to convince him to wait. They considered me Mamed's best friend, someone he held in great esteem. Not surprisingly, I had no luck with Mamed. He was stubborn, and became resentful whenever anyone tried to make him change his mind. This rigidity annoyed me. We avoided talking about it, because when we did, he lost his sense of humor and even his ability to think straight. One day, after a discussion in which he had to admit he was wrong, he became unusually angry, saying: "Sometimes I wonder why we're friends, since we never agree about anything." I didn't take this comment seriously. He wasn't making any sense. For once I was the one to bring up his faults, something he never hesitated to do with me. We never seemed able to give each other a break. But somehow things were never even.

Mamed and Ghita s wedding took place as planned. I was the couples closest friend. Ghita, a pretty brunette, was an unemployed sociologist. I knew Mamed wanted to have a family; he had sown his wild oats. But I was surprised that he decided so quickly. He told me it was not love at first sight. It had developed slowly-slowly but surely. He had a theory about married life that was a mixture of cliche and real reflection. For him, love blossomed through daily cohabitation. He cited his parents as an example. According to him, it was better to choose a virtuous woman rather than a great beauty who was arrogant and difficult. So Mamed settled down, and I was the only friend he continued to see on a regular basis. He had changed. He had gained weight, and he became irascible.

Little things made him angry. He no longer had any patience. Our time together was not as relaxed and easy as before. It seemed to bother him that I was still a bachelor.

I had no desire to settle down and marry a nice girl just to avoid being alone. When I met Soraya, it was love at first sight, an earthquake, a tempest in my heart, an avalanche of light and stars. Unlike Mamed, I chose beauty, which came with both arrogance and fickleness. Mamed refused to voice his opinion, claiming the issue was too personal to be discussed, even between close friends. Against the advice of my parents, I married Soraya. Her mere presence made me deliriously happy. She was intelligent and shrewd, volatile and vivacious. I had one year of peace and happiness with Soraya. She never argued with me, and she was good to my elderly parents. She was sweet and loving in public, and even became friends with Ghita, which pleased Mamed. He wanted to hire Soraya as an assistant in his clinic. I refused, thinking this might someday jeopardize our friendship. Mamed finally agreed with me, and instead hired a young nurse who wasn't particularly gracious but very efficient.

After finishing my degree, I was appointed professor of history and geography in Larache, a small coastal fishing town eighty kilometers south of Tangier. I commuted to work, as Soraya's parents had lent us an apartment in a building they owned. They refused to rent it, claiming that Moroccans were unreliable tenants. My wife worked as a nurse in the local Red Cross Society. We lived a petit-bourgeois existence, with limited horizons and limited ambitions. Once in a while, Ramon came to visit. He had married a Moroccan woman and converted to Islam. He now called himself Ab-derrahim, and he spoke Arabic. He said, "Ramon, Rahim- it's practically the same thing." But to us, he was still Ramon.

Mamed and I had a weekly ritual: we met in a cafe every Sunday morning between eight and nine. First we discussed current events, then turned to gossip. From time to time, some of our old high school classmates or teachers would join us. We always avoided making political observations. We knew that police informants lurked among the cafegoers. Those were the days when Morocco lived under a sort of martial law, under which opponents of the government were arrested. Some disappeared forever. Faced with their families, the police would pretend to look for them, knowing, of course, that another branch of the police had taken care of them for good. We were haunted by this idea of disappearing forever, vanishing into thin air, reduced to a mound of earth without being officially declared dead. Lost and never found. Lost and never buried. I remember a woman who went crazy, wandering the streets with a photo of her son, refusing to go home until she found him. She slept on the sidewalk in front of the police headquarters. One day she vanished. People said the police had made her disappear, just like her son. We lived with this fear in our guts, but we never talked about it.

Mamed and I shared books and records. Some evenings we would have a drink together, either at his place or mine. Mamed liked only cheap whisky, which he drowned in soda water. These days he smoked brown-tobacco Casa-Sport cigarettes. His famous Favorites had been taken off the market, due to a documentable increase in lung cancer among those who smoked them. 1 got by with a little bit of Galavuiline, a pure malt whisky I bought under the table from a Jewish grocer who got it from Ceuta.When Ramon joined us, he drank Coke. Like a lot of converts, he was serious about his religion. He no longer drank rioja or ate Spanish ham. We teased him about it, and he laughed.

Mamed and I talked, argued, criticized each other, engaged in wordplay and dark humor. He was much better than I was at verbal banter, but I knew more about film and poetry. These exchanges were supposed to keep our minds active so we wouldn't fall into the lethargy most people in Tangier suffered from. Especially in those days, when everybody lived in wariness and fear. A diffuse fear, without name or shape.

Our wives saw each other, but they never became close friends. Mamed and I rarely talked about our marital problems. We avoided it because we knew instinctively that nothing good could come from such discussions. He intuited my difficulties, and I his. We remained supportive of each other, but had no need to say it or to show it publicly. There were usually no subjects that were taboo in our conversations, but we must have been thinking of Bob Marley's misogynist "No Woman, No Cry." In Morocco, as everybody knew, it was the men who made the women cry. They cried in silence. Women did not have the right to complain. In friendship, as in love, everyone needs an element of mystery. This was less true of me than of Mamed, who loved secrecy, perhaps a weakness acquired during his Communist days.

Our friendship was about to undergo a five-year hiatus. Without any stain to its purity, it just went underground. It happened naturally, without either of us deciding anything. It was simply the result of physical separation.

Mamed was offered a job with the World Health Organization, and after some hesitation, he finally took it. He agreed with me that it would be good for him to leave the familiarity of Tangier to advance his professional life elsewhere. So he left for Stockholm on a trial basis, to see if it would suit him. As he had left Ghita behind for the time being, we made sure we saw her regularly, and frequently invited her to our home. While Mamed was away, I found a replacement for him at his doctor's office. I did the bookkeeping, paid the bills, and generally watched over his family's needs. I bought a notebook in which I kept track of all the finances to the nearest cent, informing Mamed of every transaction. He called often, and I sent him letters with every business transaction clearly detailed.

The next summer he came back, having decided to sell his office and stay in Stockholm. He sold his medical practice to my nephew, who had just finished his degree. My older brother paid Mamed's asking price without quibbling. Everything seemed to go very well. However, I began to realize that Mamed was obsessed with money, whether out of fear of having too little or mere avarice.

With my best friend gone, I felt completely alone. Our letters and telephone calls became less and less frequent. I became depressed. My wife didn't understand why I missed Mamed so much. She made occasional jealous scenes. She kept telling me to open my eyes to reality. I thought they were wide open.

One day, Mamed called from a telephone booth and asked if I was alone. I said yes. He confessed that since they had gone to Sweden, his family life had become a living hell. Ghita would become hysterical to the point of violence. I was her favorite target. She accused me of having cheated Mamed on the sale of his practice. She was sure I had exploited our friendship in order to get a good deal for my brother. Her parents had supposedly informed her of the "real price," and had even advised her to sue me for taking advantage of the situation for personal gain. I was stunned, deeply hurt. Mamed said that it was all a pretext on his wife's part to break up our friendship. I told him that my wife was jealous, too. I understood then that our relationship, built over so many years, was in jeopardy. I had fooled myself into thinking that our friendship was indestructible, that nothing could come between us.

Later, I made the mistake of repeating this conversation to my wife, who took advantage of it to pour out a torrent of emotion. You are so naive, she told me. This guy has used you. He has always been self-interested. His friendship has never been sincere. His wife is right to accuse us. We gave her the opportunity to humiliate us. One good deed is often repaid with a bad one. You should know that, since you've been swindled so many times by people you considered your friends, people who took advantage of your kindness. It's a weakness, when it all comes down to it. It's special form of stupidity. Now you have proof that your best friend isn't a true friend. He pretended to be on your side, but in fact allowed himself to be manipulated by his petty, jealous wife. You need to get rid of these so-called friends. You tell them all your secrets. I bet you even tell them about our arguments, our sex life. You can't keep a secret. You're riddled with vanity. Ah, the respected teacher, the distinguished pedagogue, the old leftie who has fallen into line with the corrupt majority! Well, thanks to Ghita, now we know. Mamed is not your friend. He is jealous and bitter, he's a slave to his wife, he does just what she tells him to, and you believe everything he says. Youd be better off taking care of your own family, saving some money so that I can go to France and see a gynecologist who can help me have a child…

I had married soraya for her beauty and intelligence, but when she realized she could never have a child, she turned into a different woman. Our life revolved around her fertility problems. She read everything she could, wrote to specialists in France and America, tried diets to encourage ovulation, went to faith healers, and even had a telephone consultation with Jacques Testard, who had just succeeded in creating "Amandine," the first test-tube baby. She decided to try in vitro fertilization. Her parents were firmly opposed, saying this was all in the hands of Allah and we should never contradict his divine will. Her parents' opinion mattered, since they were the only ones who could afford to pay for this expensive procedure. In order to lay to rest any doubt, I underwent examinations to be sure the problem had nothing to do with my sperm. Without invoking religious principles, which I didn't have anyway, I tried to convince Soraya to adopt. I discovered that Islam forbade adoption, allowing it only in the case of a child who had been abandoned, in order to give the child a chance in life. But according to Islamic practice, the child would always remain the fruit of an adulterous relationship, and would never have the right to bear the name of the adoptive family. It had to do with laws related to heritage and incest. Still, on a practical level, corruption made anything possible. We could obtain false papers, documents, family certificates. Even if Soraya agreed to adopt a child, I told her I wouldn't do anything illegal.

The birth of Adel, Mamed and Ghita's first child, was traumatic for Soraya. She made a heroic effort to overcome her jealousy, yet it took nothing but the slightest remark or reminder to set her off-a pregnant cousin, a neighbor's inquiry, a television ad for diapers. She would become depressed all over again.

I don't know whether my friendship with Mamed suffered from this. Distance and infrequent contact had preserved our bond. When Mamed called to ask how I was doing, he talked as if we had seen each other the day before. I avoided telling him about Soraya's fertility problems, just as he avoided discussing his marriage. Mostly, we talked about cultural events. He recommended books and films he was able to see before they came to Tangier. I caught him up on the local gossip. He liked to know what was happening while he was gone. It was as though Tangier belonged to him.