Laila Lalami - Secret Son

Walking back from the kiosk, magazine tucked under his arm, Youssef had the feeling of being watched. The enormity of what he had agreed to do began to settle upon him.

Many years later, Nabil would still remember it as an ordinary day, a Saturday like any other: Amal ate breakfast, answering with shoulder shrugs and rolls of the eyes whenever he addressed her; went to the gym to work out; came back and then disappeared into her room; played some music on the stereo. Around lunchtime, as Nabil was trying to convince Malika to change their evening plans, Amal came down the stairs, dragging a suitcase behind her. He thought she must have been confused about the date of next Saturday’s meeting of the Association of Moroccan Hoteliers in Marrakech; he was going to make a joke that she had a worse memory than her mother. But then she turned toward them, he saw the expression on her face, and he understood. She was lost to him. She was going back to that man.

Nabil knew it was useless to stop her, but he tried anyway. He got up from the plush armchair and in five quick paces he had crossed the living room and was standing at the bottom of the staircase. He noticed at once that she was still wearing the turquoise necklace that man had given her. She looked so young, so innocent, so full of a kind of hope he had long forgotten, and he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her and never let go.

Behind him, Malika asked her chirpily, “Are you going to Marrakech?”

“No, Maman,” Amal said, moving slightly to the right so she could better see her mother. “To Los Angeles.”

“You’re not going,” Nabil replied in his sternest voice. “You belong here. In your country, with your family. What will you do there?”

“I will be with him.”

There it was, her choice. He wished he could go back in time and unhear those words, but it was like wishing the sun had not come up that morning.

His wife stepped up. “The Royal Air Maroc flight for the U.S. has already left. You have to wait till tomorrow,” she said. She sounded like someone who was bartering with the grocer, trying to get a better deal on a kilo of potatoes. Maybe she thought that one more day with Amal would make a difference and she could change her daughter’s mind, once more.

“I’m flying through London,” Amal replied.

Malika put her hand over her mouth.

“You will break your mother’s heart if you leave,” Nabil said, though he meant his own heart but could not say it.

Amal glanced at her mother, then bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Maman. I’m not leaving you; I just have to be with him. We’ll still see each other.”

Malika started crying, which at once irritated Nabil (did she always have to be so emotional?) and delighted him (surely the tears would affect their daughter and make her reconsider?). But nothing seemed to matter; nothing broke Amal’s resolve. She gave her mother a hug and went out to ask the driver to bring the car. When she came back for her suitcase, he took it away from her and grabbed her by the hand and tried to pull her toward the living room.

“Let go of me,” she said.

It was useless. In another minute, she was gone.

Nabil let himself slide into the armchair. He closed his eyes, and the first images that came to him were of a trip to the beach with Amal when she was five or six. It was a father-daughter weekend — Malika had gone to visit her mother. Amal sat in the backseat and sang songs and asked questions and kicked the passenger seat with her shoes. They were approaching Moulay Bousselham when a piece of gravel hit the windshield, cracking it into a cobweb of glass. Nabil stopped the car to inspect the damage. They were only fifty meters from their destination, so he decided to continue on; he would call the repairman from the house. Just as he parked the car in the driveway, the windshield gave in and a million pieces of glass fell, like rain, on the dashboard, on his arms, on his lap.

That was how he felt now, as if his already-fractured heart was at last and irremediably broken. It could never be put back together the way it was before. Amal had left him behind for the sake of that man, just as he had left Youssef behind for her sake. How could it be that he had given up the son for the daughter, and now he had neither the son nor the daughter? People always said that life was unfair, but maybe it was not. Life had caught up with him and dealt him a sentence of unendurable fairness.

He had betrayed all those he loved. When he had heard about Amal’s American boyfriend, he had yelled at her, stopped paying for her school, and pretended to give her up. He had wanted to win her back by force. The deal he had made with his daughter may have been unspoken, but it was firm; it was final: she had to apologize and return to the old ways, or she would lose his love. What he had not counted on was that she was proud and stubborn, just like him. She had refused the deal. Once she was on her own, it had been easy for that man (what kind of a name was Fernando?) to prey on her and take her away.

Youssef had appeared at AmraCo in the middle of all this, like an answer to a prayer. Nabil thought he had been given another chance. He had taken care of Youssef, tried to groom him, prepare him for his entrance into the Amranis’ world — not through the main door, of course, for there were still appearances to keep up, but through the side door, perhaps — get him to meet Amal and Malika, maybe have him come for dinner every once in a while. Then Malika found out, told Nabil’s brothers, and Nabil had to make another bargain. He gave up the son in order to keep the wife and daughter. He had not realized that the pain would hit him as sharply as that piece of gravel striking the windshield. For as long as he lived, he would never forget the look in the boy’s eyes when they stood by the car outside the company’s headquarters. The look of a child begging you to love him, and all you did was turn away.

Now even Malika would leave him. She had no reason to stay any longer. He had made a fool of her over the years. She had never cared because she had always believed that they were a family and family was more important than des affaires de cuisses . But today everything had changed. Her only daughter had left. She was standing by the window, staring outside at the road, as if she could still see Amal’s car in the distance. She had stopped crying. Her hands were folded over her chest. “Malika,” he said. She did not respond, did not turn, did not show any sign of having heard him. “Malika, we can get her back.” Nothing. It was as though she was no longer in the room with him. A kind of loneliness such as he had never known before entered his heart. If he did not have a daughter, or a son, or a wife, then who was he, in the end?

Over the next few days, he tortured himself with thoughts of a happier past, a time when he would never have made the bargains he made, a time when he still stood for something. What had happened to his world? When did things fall apart? Men of his generation were children of ’56, children of the independence. Like them, he had signed petitions for the release of Saida Menebhi, written articles for Lamalif , spent hours in Rafael Levy’s smoky living room discussing Frantz Fanon or Mehdi Ben Barka, closed down his law office during general strikes, denounced the imposition by the World Bank and the IMF of a structural adjustment plan, called these institutions “tools of neocolonialism par excellence,” collected money for the families of those killed during the bread riots of 1981. Those were years when he still dared to dream, when he was still full of love for his country.