Mohamed Choukri - For Bread Alone

When I got back to the house they painted my face with iodine. They seemed to think the scratches were important. Madame Segundi’s aunt took care of me, and let me go for a walk in her garden. Spiders’ webs covered all the plants. Under the dome of the summerhouse I noticed two dusty wooden benches half eaten away by termites. The sight filled me with profound melancholy. The garden was lugubrious. Pieces of broken objects were scattered here and there among the plants. From time to time in the trees above a bird sang briefly or fluttered its wings. Lime spattered on my head and shoulders.

We drove back to Oran. The next day the scratches on my face had turned black. When Sunday came, my employers did not take me with them when they went for their usual ride. I stayed behind alone in the house.

I turned on the radio for a moment. Then I shut it off and began to play the phonograph. I did not understand the words being sung on the records, but the music and the voices took me off to a world that I saw all in bluish-green. My mistress Monique knew I liked ‘The Blue Danube’. When she is feeling in unusually good spirits she will say: I’m going to put on your record.

I took up the photograph album and looked through the family pictures. There were some snapshots of Monique when she was a little girl. I spoke to them: Grow up! Grow up right away! As I turned the pages, she did grow up. I studied the pictures taken at the beach, where she was coming out of the water, or lying on the sand with her husband, or alone. There are three colour photographs of her where she is completely naked. In the first she is standing, leaning forward a little, with her hands folded below her belly. In the next she is kneeling on a fur-covered divan, bust erect, arms straight out behind her. I imagined her asking me: Do you like this pose? And I answered: Beautiful! Marvellous! In the third picture she is lying back on the couch, her hands behind her head, one leg slightly turned outward. Come on, said the picture. You’re mine, I told the silent woman, and I wondered who could have taken such pictures of her. Her husband, probably. If I had had a camera that morning long ago, I could have photographed Asiya coming towards the tank, bathing naked, searching frantically for her pyjamas, and running away through the orchard in fright.

I went down into the food cellar to celebrate the imaginary nuptials. First I opened the tap of a barrel and filled a carafe with red wine whose taste I knew and liked. I put some olives and some Danish Blue cheese on a plate. Then I ate and drank slowly. Certain images from the time of Aïn Khabbès activated my memory. From one of the photographs the lovely Monique was winking at me. I blew some life into it, and she stretched. She is enjoying herself now with her husband. I got a cake of hand soap and a glass of warm water from the bathroom. The photograph set off the thrill of excitement that was necessary for the delicious dream to commence. I could not have said whether I was imagining the photograph, or whether it had invented me. The delight in my body increases. I begin the dragon’s massage. It swells and reddens, and lifts its head. It sweats and pants, and I taste honey. Colours take over, one slipping after the other, drowning itself in the other, each changing into another, without colour, or the colour of all colours. I no longer knew where I was.

I heard footsteps. Rapidly I closed my fly.

What are you doing here? she demanded.

Tell me. What are you doing down here? And with my photograph album! What are you doing with that?

She seized the album and started up the stairs. I followed, hanging my head.

Who gave you permission to take my photograph album? Tell me that.

She slapped me. The blow brought about the culmination of my pleasure.

You’re drunk. You’ve been drinking, haven’t you? I forbid you ever to do such a thing again.

I wandered in a blind rage across the fields. Tigre ran along with me, sometimes behind, sometimes ahead of me. I suddenly remembered that I had left the cake of soap and the glass of water in the cellar. Monique will think: And he uses my soap, too. I felt myself drowning in shame. Now she’ll know I make love with her by myself.

On my return to the farm I found all the workmen with their families, standing in a circle around a group of sheep that had been hit by a train. Some of them had still been alive, and they had had their throats cut according to holy law. The ones already dead were of no use. That night the jackals howled and yapped close to the house. They’re eating the insides now, I thought. If I had been one of those sheep, they’d be ripping my belly now with their fangs.

Tigre came in, blood bubbling out of him, and began to run in a circle. Then he runs out and back in, whining the whole time. He is trying to lick the wounds on his neck. I went to my aunt’s house and woke her. She put ashes on him and bandaged him. The bites are deep, she said. Five or six jackals must have attacked him at once.

I tied Tigre up in my cabin for fear he would run out again, and I watched him die, little by little. He was dead before I went to sleep.

In the morning I put his body into a wheelbarrow and carted it a long way out into the country, where I buried it beside an olive tree. This was the first time I had buried a dead body. It gave me a strange feeling. I began to ask myself: Why did this dog have to die in such a painful way? And I thought of the sheep that had been mangled by the train. The shepherd is stupid. Tigre is stupid. If he had known what death was, he wouldn’t have died like this. But the world is full of stupidity. I am stupid too.

That day when I buried Tigre, I did not want to go to the main house and see Madame Segundi. I was still ashamed to face her. If you know what’s good for you, said my aunt, you’ll go and see your mistress. You’re supposed to be working.

Monique herself came to see my aunt, and sat down. I began to translate what one of them said to the other. My aunt knew only Riffian and Arabic. She used Riffian now, and Monique used Spanish. She was lovely and full of charm that afternoon. Women are difficult to understand. When a man is sure he is going to have trouble with a woman, it often turns out that he is wrong. And when he thinks a woman has forgiven him, he may be going straight towards the trouble he originally expected. Salvation and disaster depend upon the way she happens to feel at the moment. I sensed that Monique did not blame me for what I had done, but neither could she let it pass unnoticed. And so she asked me: Are you sick?

No, I’m not sick.

Then why didn’t you come to work today?

I did not answer. Then I said: The jackals killed Tigre last night.

Your uncle told me. Poor dog! He was good and strong. Where did you bury him?

Under an olive tree.

Your uncle will find another dog. She got up and took my hand. Her goodwill made me even more ashamed. Allez! Come to the house with me, she said.

Then she hasn’t told her husband, I thought. Perhaps she was ashamed to.

I had often dreamed of being able to fly. Likewise I had dreamed of being in a cave strewn with lengths of silk and rugs, and where the walls were painted with brilliant designs. I had only to make a gesture, and a platter would be there, bearing whatever it was that I felt like eating. If I clapped my hands, a marvellous girl would appear, one who had never been touched by a man, to dance naked in a fog of incense smoke before me.

One morning after her husband had gone out, I saw Monique go into the bathroom with a packet of cotton and a pair of her underpants. In the garbage pail I had often seen wads of cotton soaked with dark blood. I wondered where the blood came from.

I walked carefully over to the door and peeked through the keyhole. She takes off the underwear she has on and sits down on the bidet. She makes water. Then she washes between her legs. She pats a small towel into her wound, like the first woman I ever slept with in the brothel in Tetuan. She seizes a handful of absorbent cotton, pulls out the towel and examines it, and throws it into the bathtub. Then she puts the cotton into the wound and pulls on the clean underpants. I wondered if all women bled like this one, like pretty Monique. If they bleed all the time, it’s disgusting.