Tahar Ben Jelloun - A Palace in the Old Village

Nabile is athletic, well built, muscular, and good-looking. He doesn’t think of himself as handicapped and likes to help people. When he sees someone having trouble walking, he’ll take an arm and escort that person across the street. He has hidden gifts. One day we were at Marcel’s place. Suddenly we heard somebody playing the piano — and not a beginner, either, just hitting any old keys. It was Nabile, who had quietly sat down at the instrument and begun improvising, to the delight and amazement of us all. He’s an independent boy, meticulous, a bit of a perfectionist.

I WATCHED THE ELECTIONS, when Le Pen sprang his big surprise on Chirac, and I had a good laugh, but my wife was afraid and wondered if we should start packing.* No, I said, don’t worry, Le Pen needs us, oh yes. Imagine this country emptied of its immigrants, when he could no longer blame all evil and uncertainty on us, claiming that we’re taking advantage of social security and child benefits! He’d be in a fix without Arabs to pick on. No, he’s putting on his usual act. He’ll never get any real power, but who knows, politics — sometimes I watch it on TV, and when they talk about us it’s a bad sign. No one says anything nice about our work. That’s how it’s always been; I’m used to it.

And you know how I hate suitcases and those huge plastic bags in garish colours from discount stores, “migrant bags” they’re called, and I hate packing cases crammed with useless stuff we have to lug along to the village to hand out to the stay-at-homes. I hate luggage, obligatory gifts, junk that piles up in the cellar. I hate things that glitter and aren’t worth spit — but you, you’re always afraid of running out of something, you carry so much with you that even I begin to wonder if maybe war might break out, if we’d better stock up, so I don’t object, I keep quiet, let you do what you want.

Well, anyway, I watched Le Pen: he’s scary, he has fat hands, and slaps from those hands must make a guy see stars, fake stars, but I can’t take him seriously, I don’t know why; he makes me laugh, and I always imagine him in rather unflattering positions, the nasty kind, yet I know there are other Le Pens in this country who may not talk the way he does but they don’t like us just the same, and how come? How come no one likes us? What terrible thing did we do to be objects of suspicion and even abuse in the street? Our reputation isn’t exactly spotless, which must come from way back, maybe the Algerian war or even longer ago, and obviously there’s the rotten-apple-spoiling-the-whole-barrel business, so what can we do? Keep a low profile? We are low-profile experts, my companions and I — we hunker down, don’t raise our voices even when we’ve been the victims of some injustice or everyday racism because we don’t want any trouble. What can we do? Disappear! Cease to exist, become transparent while still slaving away — in fact, that would be ideal: to be here, being useful, efficient, but invisible, without having children or cooking with our smelly spices, and I’ve often thought about that, how to be as low-key as possible and work as if we didn’t exist. Before, or at least when I came to LaFrance, no one mentioned us; we started off in projects housing immigrant workers, then later hardly ever ventured into town, but when our children came along the noise level rose, and quite a bit, so why attract even more attention by asking for citizenship? I’m fine with my green passport, my ten-year residence permit. I don’t need a different colour passport.

Seems the people of LaFrance prefer us Moroccans; the poor Algerians, they’re out of luck: their country’s been occupied for so long, and nowadays Algeria is rich, I saw that on TV. They’ve got oil and gas, underground treasures that will feed them for centuries, yet they’re emigrating — more and more are coming here. It’s awful, such a rich country with such poor people! (It’s not me saying that but a human rights activist in Algeria.) It’s different in Morocco. We’re poor and always have been. City people live better than country folk. But us, we have the Makhzen: the caïd , the pasha, the governor — representatives of the central power that governs us. We don’t know how it works, but the police and the army do whatever the Makhzen wants. The poor person has no rights, submits, and keeps quiet. Whoever hollers gets “disappeared.” That’s the Morocco I left in 1960, to take the train then the boat then the train to Lalla França. I never talked politics. I know, however, that both sons of the butcher in Imintanout went missing. A couple of plainclothesmen who said they were from the Darkoum Real Estate Agency asked the two young men to show them some land their father had for sale, and the car they drove off in had a temporary license plate even though it was basically a jalopy. The youths never returned. The father went to Marrakech to find the agency, which had never existed. The mother went mad, and the father shut up shop. That was in the summer of 1966. They were high school kids in Marrakech. Whenever I visited in the summer, people would tell me about all the youngsters in prison, almost whispering even though there was no one near us.

Fear, yes, I have known fear. Fear that they would take away my precious passport, fear that I would be arrested for no reason. That happened to Lahcen, who was held in the police station at the airport for more than two days; they had forgotten him. When they gave him back his passport, the officer said, Since you’re lucky to live over there, think of your brother, empty your pockets — we have to help one another, it’s only natural, because some have everything and others almost nothing but suffering, and you won’t let your brother suffer, so take a hint, my friend! Lahcen gave him whatever money he had and left the police station suffering from a wicked migraine.

Fortunately, that Morocco no longer exists. It’s over, the time of fear, when the Makhzen acted without respect for the law and what’s right. I discovered this going through customs in Tangier. Overnight the customs agents had become polite, no longer suspecting us of smuggling drugs or weapons. It seems the new king ordered them to stop harassing us. He’s a good fellow, this young king, not at all like his father.* At the time, some of our immigrants worked for the consulate or the police in Rabat, and we could identify them because they would loudly criticise the king and the government. Me, I always said Long live the king, long live Morocco! Then they had nothing to report to their bosses. It was Marcel, the union rep, who warned me: You know, watch out. That Sallam, the guy who just arrived from Roubaix, well, he never worked there; he came directly from Rabat and funnels information about the Moroccan immigrant community to the police. There’s him and the other one, the really skinny guy who calls himself FelFla, “Pepper.”

The CGT, the labor union federation, has always helped us. They’re the ones who organised literacy classes on Saturdays and Sundays at the Labor Exchange, run by young students from Paris and French-speaking guys from our cities — Fez, Marrakech, Casablanca — who would take turns coming to teach us. We enjoyed those afternoons, found them relaxing — we’d talk about home; our teachers explained things; sometimes the French students would help us write letters to our families and, most importantly, fill out official forms for our retirement, bank accounts, and so on. Even if I did have trouble learning the language, I preferred being there to spending the day in a café, watching people come and go. At my age, learning to read is no joke. I did pick up driving pretty easily, though. I’d stare at the signs and imprint them in my head. I’ve always been a prudent man. I know the highway code by heart. Where I run into trouble, it’s with detours: there I screw up and choose some road that takes me back to where I came from. Roadworks and those detours, they terrify me. I know the France — Morocco trip by heart. I never speed. I stop now and then for rest breaks. I get backaches, so I do exercises. Often it’s having to pee that makes me pull over. That’s how we found out I’ve got the sugar — a young Moroccan doctor explained to me about diabetes. Now I’m careful, although back home I do let myself go, I admit. That’s what it’s for: letting go, not worrying, forgetting about rules. It’s hard to say no to a glass of our sweetened mint tea; that hurts people’s feelings, so I drink the tea and ask God to help me deal with all that extra sugar in my blood.